


Blood Loss

by atrere



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Do Tags Negate the Validity of Narrative Direction Through Categorization, Existential Crisis, F/M, Is RE-Take a genre? If so - that, Mania, Self-Harm, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-05
Updated: 2019-11-20
Packaged: 2020-10-10 10:30:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 8
Words: 24,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20526548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atrere/pseuds/atrere
Summary: A small slice from when Harry's life began to change. A somewhat larger one out of Vriska.I don't know why I like this ship so much, maybe because it's Earth-C, we're well outside of the realm of canon, and that means I have a lot of freedom in shaping characters that only showed up for a few scenes. If I come into conflict with Epilogue canon, it's more likely than not that I'm going to just barrel through it in pursuit of whatever the hell it is I want to write.A continuing story dealing both with violent romance and metafictional rebellion.





	1. Chapter 1

Harry Anderson Egbert, like many other teenagers, was looking to sneak out of his house on a Saturday afternoon, to do something his parents probably wouldn't approve of. Unlike many other teenagers, however, Harry's parents were nigh-immortal demigods partially responsible for the destruction of two universes and the creation of this one, which complicated things slightly. They were both, of course, well-acquainted with tricks and japery, so classics like the ol' "tie your bedsheets into a rope and rappel down the side of your house while playing loud music" wouldn't work. There was always the technique of just walking out the door silently, but trying to leave no trace whatsoever brushed uncomfortably close to his mother's domain. No one seemed to be clear on what exactly being a "Rogue of Void" meant, but as far as Harry could tell, it involved making "something" out of "nothing", and well, if he tried to make nothing out of heading into the city to see a... friend? - his mother would certainly make something out of it.

That left one way of leaving the house without making a fuss, one that Harry felt he could maybe pull off. Just declare loudly what he was doing and walk out, like there was nothing that anyone could possibly object to about it, and let confidence and charm carry the day.

"Hey, I'm heading into the city to catch a roller derby match, I'll be back in a while," he called out. Harry patted his wallet, straightened his glasses, and patted down his light green blazer. He wanted to look sharp if he was going to see-

Shit.

"Hi, mom."

Roxy Lalonde Egbert was, as his grandfather would have said, "one hell of a little firecracker". This was, in general, pretty endearing, and Harry got on with his mother pretty well. That spontaneity was less endearing when it resulted in her damn-near jumpscaring Harry by suddenly appearing six inches from his face. She was leaning towards him, hands behind her back, in one of her sundresses straight out of the 1950s. Well, the 1950s of a universe that no longer existed, but the 1950s nonetheless.

"Hey kiddo. Whatcha up to?" Harry would describe her tone as "overly friendly" on anyone else, but on his mother, it was just the way she was, as far as he could tell.

"I, uh, just said, you heard me, right?"

Instead of responding, his mother squinted at him, watching his eyes.

"Uh, mom?" he ventured. She wasn't listening. At least, not to his words.

"We need to talk," she informed him, and ushered him out of the front hall, and into one of the several living rooms, one whose decor was more in line with his aunt Jade's grandfather's style. Who... was maybe his uncle, too? Ectobiology was dumb.

There, they sat down next to each other on a couch that, at one point, may have resembled a Denizen, but if it ever did, they were far less impressive than they were in the stories his father had bombarded him with as a kid. Harry stared at the floor, avoiding his mother's gaze.

"I know you're going to see that troll friend of yours, Harry. I just want you to be careful, you know?" She sounded as motherly as she ever had, and it made Harry squirm.

"Just because she's a troll doesn't mean she's bad, I don't care what Aunt Jane says, Vr-"

His mother cut him off, sharply. "Don't say that name."

"What?"

Roxy sighed. "It's... complicated, okay? John - I mean, your father... has some history with her namesake."

Harry looked up at her, confused. "What do you mean?"

"I... I haven't told him about you two, but the person Rose and Kanaya named her after, well... a lot of his memories of her aren't pleasant. And after this world started shaking out, and we started getting memories of what could have been... I think some were."

"Wait, were they-" As he started talking, he saw the look on his mother's face, and shut up. He couldn't tell what it was, besides painful.

"I've never asked him." It was her turn to look at the floor. "It's not my place, y'know? But I think your father has some inkling of what's going on, and..."

"I was worried about that," Harry admitted. He briefly looked up, towards the study his father had been spending most of his time in lately. "I thought he might be... I dunno, disappointed in me or something, and maybe that was why he's been so quiet." He looked to her for confirmation, or something, anything.

His mother nodded. Harry felt like he was a balloon animal, and the air had just been let out of it. "It's not the only thing, I think, but it's part of it. He keeps to himself when he needs to process things. But look." She cupped his chin in her hands, and looked right into his eyes.

"You're a lot like your father. And she's a lot like the troll she was named after. And she hurt him, Harry. I don't want you to get hurt by, uh, her."

Harry sighed. "It'll be okay mom, I promise," he said, not knowing if he was lying or not.

"I'm not like your aunt, but trolls are... different." No shit, Harry thought. "Everybody's different, but don't expect to be her one and only. Maybe you will be, maybe you won't be. But you'll be working on her terms."

That was... more frank than Harry had expected. But most of the words had just flown past him. "So you'll let me go?"

Roxy nodded, smiling. "Of course. Have fun out there, kiddo!"

Harry left in a hurry.

Unfortunately, being in a hurry didn't make up for the lost time from his impromptu heart-to-heart with his mother. He just missed the first bus into the city, and ended up standing at the stop for nearly an hour. He hated that his father insisted on living in the suburbs, and he hated that he'd probably miss the whole damn game at this rate. Maybe at least he'd catch her on the way out of the stadium...

The trip felt like it took forever, until he was there, at which point it had been no time at all.

While the cultural output of Earth-C was nothing to sneeze at, the fact that the history of both Alternia and Earth, along with their movies, literature, and music, were brought over by the half-memories of a couple of teenagers meant that, as far as Harry could tell, it was pretty derivative. Of course, maybe that's how things always were? But regardless, he found himself drawn to troll entertainment. The stories were packed to the brim with drama, bloodshed, intricate romances and loads of heartbreak. As a kid, he was all about comedy, though not the Strider-sort of interwoven layers of irony, more like... Buster Keaton-type stuff. But being a teenager, he felt like troll media kind of... got him. It felt like the world was being torn apart by horrible decisions, right after it had been saved by a bunch of heroes who he couldn't even come close to aspiring to be. Every bit of angst in him was mirrored by the troll zeitgeist, every bit of tormented hormonal teenage bullshit reflected and amplified by the intense tragedies of lifespan-mismatched troll couples, of rebellion against the old empire, or those of trying to find identity in this new world.

And, on a more base level... God damn he loved troll rollerball. Trolls had had their own sports back in the Alternian days, but on this new planet, they had taken human sports, mixed them with their own, and created something wonderful. There was a violence to troll sports that just wasn't possible with human sports. With their regenerative capacities and their hearty constitutions, plus a bit of surgical know-how, a troll could withstand damn near anything short of a decapitation, if tended to soon enough. And who knew, maybe even that. He wasn't sure if it was just because he was a teen, or because something was fundamentally wrong with the world, but he felt pointless. Everything felt pointless. But it was easier to feel like something had meaning if there were lives and limbs on the line. And she was a star.

Harry ran up the front steps of the stadium, where a troll in full rollerball gear, minus her left leg below the knee, and a good chunk of her left arm, too, lay, being tended to by a teammate. Harry felt an immediate, sickening pang of worry as he saw cerulean blood pooling on the concrete, and all rationalizations of how hardy trolls and how easy they were to fix up were were flushed out of his mind like so many tadpoles in a toilet. He couldn't tell if it was just his fears, or something real, but he could swear, just maybe, that the shade was slightly off. He _knew_ blood of that color down to its fucking hex codes, and that wasn't her.

And so, Harry looked up, a story's worth of steps above them, to a troll standing, her hips cocked, her whole posture dripping victorious confidence. Her figure, clad in orange and yellow leather, was incredible. Thin, maybe, scrawny, yeah, but lithe? Also yes. Perfect? You bet your ass Harry thought so. Her helmet, facemask, and everything below it were spattered with blood from all castes, along with a jagged tear on the right side of her abdomen, ringed with seeping cobalt. Harry was awestruck, as usual. She took off her helmet slowly, keeping her face down, and with her free hand, she flipped her long black hair out and back, like a mane flowing in the wind, meeting his eyes with her yellow gaze. There she was.

Vriska motherfucking Lalonde.

"Hey nerd, sup?"

And just like that, everything else melted away, and it was just like every other time they met.

"Just thought you might need a hand limping home, dork," he replied.

She laughed, haughtily, derisively, but with an undertone that felt like a taunting smirk from a shark bearing just a hint of teeth. Harry grew intensely aware of her fang-like teeth, and wondered, idly, what they'd feel like on his neck.

"Do I _look_ like I need a hand, Hare-ball?" She gestured at herself, slowing her hand almost imperceptibly as it passed her hips.

Harry snorted, and couldn't help smiling at her. "Nah, you look like you just eviscerated the entire opposing team. And that one's lame, I'm the one homeschooled in the art of stupid puns, Vris."

Vriska raised her eyebrows, and looked up in faux-innocence. "Not the _entire_ team, and what, should I just go back to calling you shit-head?"

Harry shrugged. He barely noticed the troll at his feet being carted off by a medical drone. "That'd be better, but being that lazy is kinda below you, isn't it?"

She looked at him for a moment, thinking. Vriska then tossed her helmet back behind her without a care, and sauntered down to him, slipping her arm around his waist, underneath his jacket. His whole body tensed up at the touch, and he didn't know whether her warmth sent a tingle up his spine, or if the wetness of her blood staining his shirt gave his goosebumps, but both things happened, and damned if he didn't react both ways.

"Maybe," Vriska said. She must have noticed his reaction, because she rested her head on his shoulders, gently, softly, very much unlike her. She smelled primal, like blood and sweat and just a hint of almond. Her voice came out as soft as a purr. "If I'm going to be laaaaaaaazy with you, maybe I'll just call you Harry." She traced a finger down his chest. "Would you like that, Haaaaaaaarry?"

He clenched his teeth. It was taking all of his willpower not to... he didn't even know, there were too many things racing through his head, and if he didn't just kiss her right the fuck now he was going to-

Vriska pushed him back suddenly, and Harry fell right on his ass, nearly tumbling down the steps. She doubled over, laughing hysterically, the kind of lilting cackle that he'd only heard come out of her.

"Oh my god, I _had_ you, you'd have done anything I said, wouldn't you?"

Harry, relieved to be free of the tension of that moment, started laughing along. "Holy shit, Vris, you're too good at that, I nearly..." He trailed off, and he felt the blood rush to his cheeks.

Vriska stared at him, and as she realized what almost just _actually happened_, began to blush a deep blue. Harry was gobsmacked at the sight - Vriska Lalonde, blushing like a schoolgirl, whatever that meant.

It was then, in the middle of that moment, that Vriska slouched awkwardly to one side, and sucked in air through her teeth before letting out a gasp. Harry leapt to his feet, and grabbed her by the shoulders, steadying her.

"I'm okay, I'm okay," she protested, but Harry knew her, she'd say that even if half her face was missing. A fresh gush of her blood spilled out onto the pavement. That couldn't be right.

"Jesus, Vris, how much do you even have in you?"

She giggled. "Wouldn't you like to know?"

That was most definitely not normal. Harry acted quick, angling her shoulder under her arm on the opposite side of her wound, and started forcing her to move, step by step, to the sidewalk.

"Seriously, how much blood did you lose?"

She smirked. "More than you dumb humans could lose."

"We're going to the hospital, got it?" Harry said. There was nothing she could say to convince him otherwise.

"Naaaaaaah, I'm fiiiiiiiine," she said, clinging to him. Her fingernails were starting to dig into his skin through little tears in his clothes. Even in this state, she was freakishly strong, and she was starting to draw blood. Not that Harry minded.

"Jesus fucking Christ, Vriska, just do it for me," he said, desperation starting to creep into the edges of his voice. She noticed it before he did, and when she looked up into his eyes, Harry realized just how worried he sounded. Any idiot could be an insensitive asshole, but Vriska was an artisan of the craft, and that took being seriously perceptive.

She looked to her wound, and prodded it with a finger. Another spurt of blood shot out, and her knee twitched. If she hadn't been holding on to Harry, she would have eaten pavement.

"Okay," she said, quietly.

Vriska was not supposed to be someone short on words or retorts. All the more reason for Harry to hurry up. He looked back, up the steps.

"I'll grab your helmet once we get you in a taxi, then we go."

She smiled. "Don't woooooooorry about it, babe. I'm a motherfucking Lalonde, I can just buy a new one."

Harry flagged down a taxi, and it pulled up, a rustblood behind the wheel. "I don't care what you "motherfucking" are, right now you're getting in this car."

Vriska let out a short chortle, as she sort of fell into the car. "I bet you care about what mother fucking Makara gets up to with your aunt."

"Ew, gross, no one should have to think about that." Harry propped her upright, and got into the other side of the taxi, telling the driver to go, hospital, now.

She collapsed onto him, and the stain of her blood began to spread across the upholstery.

"I. Got. You. Good," Vriska said, prodding his chest with a finger with every word, which were beginning to slur. "And don't you talk to me about your stupid human Jesus, I could kick the shit out of him any time, any day, any place."

And with that, she passed out.


	2. Liminality

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I've officially gone off the rails enough to forget that trains ever existed. Do trains even exist on Earth-C?
> 
> Vriska fondly regards reality. Harry finds himself on the receiving end of affection. And a hook for the next chapter. And always, as Misato would say, more fanservice!

When Vriska Lalonde woke up, she had lost several pints of blood, a layer of clothing, and from what she could tell, her freedom of movement, and had gained several dozen stitches, a blanket over her recumbent form, and an intravenous fluid drip. Several of these things pissed her off, but that was most things these days.

One of the things that didn't, at least, didn't as often as everything else, was staring her in the face from a chair next to her hospital bed.

"Harry, get this pussy shit off me," she spat. Her wrists kept finding resistance -

Harry laughed.

"I told them you wouldn't like this, y'know." He stood up, and started fiddling with her wrists, and something came off her with a ripping sound. "And what is it with you and human sex terms?"

She looked down, and saw the cuff that had been on her left wrist. "Velcro? Fucking _really_? Am I a cat or something?" Now that one hand was free, she ripped off the cuff on the other, and tore the IV out of her arm. "And trolls aren't gross enough for how I feel."

Egbert looked at her like... well, like she was crazy, but that was more empowering than annoying. If she was crazy, the world couldn't see her coming. And he was along for the ride whether he liked it or not. She threw herself out of the hospital bed, wanting to feel precisely _none of this_.

And, for the first moment out of the last several, she actually looked at her surroundings. White tile. Beige drywall. A gray CRT television nestled between the wall and the ceiling, replaying a poorly compressed sitcom from one of the Gods' archives. And that smell, that damned smell of... she didn't even know what - Old humans? The chemicals they used to disguise rot? Fuck, she didn't want to think about senescence. Not now. Especially not now.

"You brought me to a _human_ hospital?" she asked, coating it with a fine layer of derision.

"Uh, yeah," Egbert said. "There was one closer."

"Seriously?" she replied. "A human hospital closer than a troll hospital to a _fucking troll sports stadium_? Fuck your aunt so much."

Harry nodded. She had half expected him to laugh. "Yeah, fuck her. Like, really..." He let out a long sigh, and suddenly, he was looking at her. Slowly. _Very_ slowly, for that matter, like a goddamn ironic take on a Michael Bay pan from one of the Strider flicks. Why did she even know the _name_ of that?

But it occurred to her that, just maybe, the thin jumpsuit she wore underneath her roller derby uniform, the jumpsuit she was currently _only_ wearing, might be a little sheer, given the firm nature of troll skin...

She tried not to think about how she felt about that, and failed.

"Harry, you picked up my clothes, right?"

He blinked. "Oh, uh, yeah, I went back for your stuff while you were out, I'll, uh, go get it, be right back," he stammered, and retreated out the door of the room.

She really did have a hell of an effect on him, didn't she, Vriska thought. As she held this thought in her mind, along with the feeling of his eyes on her, and six or so other things, her internal narrative began to fail her. So, she walked over to the window, overlooking a courtyard - _a fucking courtyard, what troll healthcare facilities have the budget or land permits for that shit_ \- and barely noticed as her grip cracked the wooden windowframe. Once she did notice, she let it crush utterly in her grasp. The window dropped in its frame to an angle very much unintended by its designers. She wanted to punch it. She wanted to bleed all over it, mark it, break it, she wanted to make it goddamn real.

A small voice sounded in her head, one she recognized as one of her mothers. A voice of reason, of integrating with the world, of making it a better place. Even if it was necessary to tear down its institutions and build anew, Kanaya's way was... Conformist, to her mind. Why the hell was a rebellious reconstructor of the troll race conformist? Vriska wasn't given to self-analysis - it was less a question of _why_ she felt that way, and more a question of _where does that lead?_

She knew well her other mother's mindset. Rose, too, was rebellious, and agreed with the same rants that Kanaya delivered, and theoretically, Vriska agreed with. But that - That wasn't how this worked at all. What was _salient_ was Rose's stories. She was given to flights of fancy. And she was given to playing the devil's advocate, saying things just because she found that they stimulated a response in people. And so, Rose had spoken, more than once, about her war on Sburb. Grimdark, Kanaya had referred to it as, with noticeably less derision than Rose agreed with the term with. It had been something that _clicked_ with Vriska. The idea of rebelling against reality itself...

Sometimes, it felt that more than just the circumstances of the world were wrong.

If you leaned on the frames of the world, just how much would they bend, and when would they crack?

She felt a surge of mania, and shoved her fist through the window. Cobalt blood ran down her arm, and she bit her lip at the pain, a feedback loop, until it, too, bled. The window wasn't what she wanted to destroy. More, the space that dared define itself as a window. But at least for the moment, she felt alive, and she didn't feel like the boundaries were slowly closing in, as they always, always were. She needed... she needed...

"Fuck, Vris, are you okay?"

Harry had re-entered the room and she hadn't even _goddamn _noticed. He was standing right behind her, wasn't he - She whipped around, and grabbed him by the collar, and pulled him close enough to feel his breath, to breath it in, to feel that stupid breath mint he'd had hours before. As if she cared. Her psychic energies washed over him, and she could _feel_ him. Even though he wasn't a troll, with enough brute force, she could take his fist and smash it into her face. It took more self control than it should have to _just not_.

"I'll take that as a no," he said, his tone sheepish, but he was smiling. Those damned green eyes were twinkling. The color smelled minty if she thought about it too much, which she had. The flecks of gold around the edges... Was that even real?

Vriska realized that her arm had nearly fully extended, and Harry's feet were well off the floor. She let him down, gently, and looked back out the window. "I'm... I'm fine," she said, lying.

Harry stood by her, knowing. She knew that he knew, and it scared the shit out of her that he might understand. Because if he understood, what even _was_ this? Her head felt like exploding. Not like it wanted to explode, but like the pure idea of exploding, a constant turmoil of combustion.

"Didn't like the view?" he said. It came out like a joke, but his hand was suddenly clamped around her forearm, pressing against the fresh wounds.

Somehow, that got a smile out of her. "Nah, it sucks."

"No offense, but I think the shades are the way to go, then." Harry pulled on the little cord that controlled the blinds - why did humans insist on all these unnecessary physical linkages - and they went into free-fall, bouncing off of Harry's head, and getting entangled in Vriska's horns on the rebound.

That was enough to get them both laughing. It was absurd. Everything was absurd. Nothing made any sense any more, but... she was laughing. She swatted at it with one hand, and the blinds fell on the opposite side of them, enclosing them both against the window. With everything else shut out... She was struck by Harry's laughter. What, really, was he laughing at? And how much did she want it to be at the same thing she was?

Fuck, she needed to be out of this moment, now. She tore the blinds off their mounting, and the whole assembly was thrown across the room, rebounding off the far wall. Egbert opened his mouth, presumably to make some witty remark, but she spoke first.

"Where'd you put my clothes?"

"Uh," Harry said, as he often began sentences. "Right there?"

His tone made sense when she _looked_. They were laid out on the bed, right behind them, in plain view. Her typical black jeans, grey t-shirt (no goddamn hemospectrum zodiac nonsense on it, thank you very much), and black canvas short-sleeve button-up that functioned somewhat like an all-weather jacket. Oh, and her flat-top shoes. Apparently they were a famous human brand, but she didn't like paying attention to those things. They were what she wanted, and therefore, what she got.

She was both alarmed and unsurprised that she hadn't noticed them. Her reactions were getting bifurcated like that more and more often...

Vriska shouldered past Harry, and started stripping off her jumpsuit. She needed to be in those clothes, there was something _safe_ to it-

"I'll be right back, okay?" Harry said, rapidly absconding. He shut the door behind him. Fuck, did she even care if he saw? But, regardless, she was now alone in this stupid room, stuck in this damn body. She might as well clean it off, she thought, and broke the sink in the little bathroom attached to the room, to get some decent water flow going on.

Fifteen or so minutes later, Vriska and Harry walked down one of the many hallways of the hospital, slowly making their way to the lobby.

"So, I was trying to explain to the doctors that you only needed some fluids and a bit of rest, and they kept saying "No, no, her injuries are too great, we have to put her under, give her some surgery, put her under watch for a day, at least", and there I am trying to explain just how stupid that sounds to anyone with a modicum of knowledge about troll biology, and they cotton on to _just the wrong thing_ \- They're constantly arguing against me "for the sake of the patient", and I say that you wouldn't stand for any of this, and they take one hell of a long look at your cobalt blood, and then start prepping _restraints_ for you! Shitty ones! I would have told them that they'd just be an annoyance for you, but, I didn't want to help them out-"

Vriska grabbed him by the wrist, and he stopped talking. She knew the force it'd take to crush his bones, in theory, and she stopped short of that, but she needed to hold tight right now. He looked at her with a concerned expression, but she only saw the quickest blink of it before focusing her gaze sternly forward.

"Harry." Her voice was flat. Somehow, the same way a chaotic pile of light blends into white, her thoughts equalized out into that.

"Vris?"

He even had a little nickname for her. She didn't even like it when her _parents_ tried to call her by a nickname. Why was this okay?

"Why do you like me?"

She kept watch on him out of the corner of her eye, and her was following her lead - staring at the floor a few meters in front of them. Good.

He stammered. Of course he'd fucking stammer, she thought, what the hell kind of question was that? When words came to him, they were wrong. "Do you mean, uh-"

"Shut up." The words came out somewhere in the middle of a spectrum between a hiss and a growl. "You _like_ me. You're attracted to me. If I didn't tell you to go away, you'd spend every moment you could with me."

Harry didn't deny this. He didn't say anything, but that was enough.

"So, _why?_ Fucking _why?_" Unconsciously, her grip tightened.

Harry swore under his breath. "Vris, you're hurting me."

_Shit_. She let go, like his arm was on fire and she cared about fire, and before she knew it, she was grabbing his hand. Fingers entwined. She felt a very different kind of _oh shit_, but an _oh shit_ nonetheless.

"Sorry," she said, quickly. She wasn't supposed to apologize, not for anything-

"It's..." Harry began. That shut her up. It took him a second to collect his thoughts, and she looked up at him for a moment, furrowing his brow. She doubted he even noticed her in that moment.

All hands were on deck on ship HMS Egbert's Explaining of Things. "I mean, you're smart, you're hot, just being near you is an adventure-"

_No no no no no no no_, she thought. A howling, primordial scream was echoing in her ears, _that's not the right_-

"I don't know how to explain it, Vris, but I feel more... solid around you."

_What_.

"Like someone turned up the contrast and vivid bars on a monitor, but... not, you know?"

_WHAT._

"Don't you fucking-" she began, but it didn't stop him.

"I've only felt that way around you and honestly I don't understand-"

Three things then happened in rapid succession.

First, Vriska flung Harry into the side of the hallway, hard enough to crack the drywall behind him, and possibly with enough twisting force to crack a bone or two in his wrist.

Then, before Harry could slump to the floor, she was on him, shutting him up with her tongue, her fingers clutching at his hair. She pressed him against the wall with her own body, and the only autonomy he had in that moment was whether or not he shut his mouth. He didn't, and Vriska exalted in the moment. She felt on fire. Alive. They were _entwined. _With a flick of her mind, she took his hand and pressed it hard to her own neck. Her nostrils flared, her eyes widened, she-

And then, a significant portion of the hospital exploded.


	3. The Wind is Gentle Until it Tears At You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> what is this I don't even  
The narrative dies / stretched and torn / Hey, spoiler warning  
Vriska and Harry-  
Something.

Harry was shell-shocked in that moment, in quite a few ways. He didn't know what was happening - again, in many ways, bur for now, he couldn't find itself in him to care.

In his blurred vision, motes of dust fell like snow, thin rays of light coming in through the cracks in the ceiling, and Vriska was lying with her head on his chest. One of her horns dug into his chin, but again, he didn't care so much about it. His arm was around her, and there was a sublime beauty in it all. If it was intentional, between either of them, it didn't matter - but their chests rose and sank in unison. So much of him hurt, but that... that was balanced out.

"Harry?" she mumbled into his chest. "What..." She cut off her question, though, if she had waited just a moment longer, it would have been cut off by something else.

The cacophony. Alarms. Sirens. Screaming.

It was selfish, Harry knew, but he hated how he felt in that moment. Like being torn out of a dream you weren't meant to wake up from. He didn't want to wake up.

Vriska was on her feet before he could even think of attempting the same. She extended a hand to him, and yanked him up, exacerbating the stabbing pain in his wrist. _Oh_, he thought. _That really happened. Holy shit._

Reality intruded, as it was wont to. "Vris, we have to get out of here."

Her eyes traced a line up his body, till they met his. "What if I said no?"

It wasn't just dust obscuring his vision. Smoke was pouring from parts unknown. His breath was getting short.

"I don't know what's happening, but-" he started coughing, and took a moment to get his voice back under control. She stared at him with an intensity that frightened a small part of him, but held the rapt attention of a much larger portion of his mind. "This is really dangerous." As if to emphasize his statement, what could only be the discharge of pulsed plasma weaponry echoed in the distance. Whatever was happening, it was awful.

"I'm going, Harry," she said, and he grabbed her arm. _Ouch._ He really must have broken something. Now, he knew by now that if Vriska wanted to, she could have just kept walking and let the cruel forces of physics pivot Harry until his face smashed into the floor, but... she didn't.

Vriska stopped.

"Vriska?" He ventured. More than anything, he hoped she'd listen. "I don't think you're okay right now."

She didn't move. It was like she had seized up, a broken machine, until she opened her mouth, slightly, to respond.

"I'm not."

He blinked. As much as that _felt_ right, in the moment, that wasn't how the Vriska he knew would respond. It was like... he scrounged his mind for an analogy - he was interfacing with her on a different level than usual. A layer had been stripped off the surface.

"Then...?" he asked, the word carrying more in implication than actual meaning.

"I need..." she started, but she trailed off. Slowly, gently, even, she grabbed the hand of his on her arm, and removed it. He wasn't sure he'd seen her move that carefully with _anything_ before.

Her hands clenched and unclenched from fists and back, and she took a deep breath that didn't even seem possible in this contaminated air. And then...

"Whatever's happening, it fucked with me, and it fucked with you. _No one_ fucks with me. Let's go."

Vriska motherfucking Lalonde was back online. That tone of voice, that swaggering step-

Of course he followed her into the smoke and debris, though the soft glow of flames, towards the sounds of strife and struggle. She walked so fast through it all - it was a minor challenge to keep up, and with the air being, well, about one third on fire, one third burnt to ash, and one third actual normal air, he quickly found himself in coughing fits.

"Pull yourself together, Harry," she said, not even looking back, and somehow, he did. He didn't have the slightest idea where they were going, but he trusted Vriska's navigation. Of course, that trust came easier considering that he was trying to shut up his mind, so he wouldn't notice the most likely dead bodies he was stepping over, or think about the fact that it easily could have been him bleeding out on the floor. Or, moderately less easily, Vriska.

Eventually, the shouting in the distance began to coalesce into something intelligible. Harry appreciated any bit of clarification as to their situation, but upon actually listening, his stomach sank.

"Too long have we stood by and let the humans take precedence over us! The Carapacians, the trolls, even humans who don't kowtow to Crocker's oppressive regime, we've all been turned into victims! We're reduced to entertainment, to bit players in a story not of our own making!"

Troll separatists. Great.

Vriska seemed to be of the same opinion. She swore under her breath, and stopped before they could see whatever was happening, at Harry's estimate, less than a hundred meters away, beyond a veil of smoke.

"Fuck, fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck, Harry, FUCK," she said, with all the eloquence of a brick.

"Yeah, I know, right?" he replied. He'd rather not get shot by terrorists.

"No, you fucking _don't_, Harry," she said, whipping back around to him. The rebuke was softened by the hazy sight of her hair flipping with the sudden turn of her neck. "Do you have any idea what this _means_?"

"Uh, we could get killed, and that'd suck?" he ventured.

She inhaled sharply, and grasped at her temples with one hand. "No, Harry, your _aunt_."

Oh, Harry thought. Fuckx7 indeed.

"Protests are one thing. Terrorist attacks, yeah, that happens, but it's usually against something people can rationalize, Harry." The words were flying out of Vriska's mouth so fast that they piled against each other, like cars in sudden snow. "Military stations, police, checkpoints, shit, it makes _sense_ to them. But this?"

"It's a fucking _hospital_," Harry followed, the possible ramifications eating away at the corners of his cognition.

"Exactly! Sure, in their eyes, it's a symbol of inequality, of systemic issues, of mistreatment, of the utter goddamn bullshit we have to deal with every day, but humans? You're going to see this as an unprompted attack on innocents!"

"I mean, it _is_, Vris..." Harry said, trying with all his might to inflect understanding despite his own words into his voice.

"I _know_, but she's going to use this to crack down on us! And who the fuck is going to oppose her when she can plaster state media with pictures of dead fucking children?"

Harry, briefly, thought of his parents. They were precisely the kind of people who _should_. Who had the power and influence to fight this kind of bullshit. But, he knew they wouldn't. Not in any meaningful way.

Vriska kept swearing to herself. "If my parents are involved somehow..."

"Through Vantas's sovereignty movemnt?"

Vriska laughed. "Thanks for saying that, and not "rebellion", fucking propaganda."

Harry shook his head. "They wouldn't be, right? They're good people."

"Yeah, but there's idiots everywhere. It just takes one person with a bad idea and conviction to screw us all over. It doesn't matter if Karkat, if my parents, if any rebellion leader endorses this, it's going to be pinned on them if there's even the most tenuous tie to them."

He knew Vriska was right.

"What should we do about it?" he asked. It was an absurd thought, but... somehow it was right.

Vriska blinked at him, and then smiled wickedly. "I thought you'd never ask." She cracked her knuckles, and wrapped an arm around Harry's shoulders conspiratorially. Her fangs poked out over her lips - god, that was a good look, the yellowish white over harsh black - and Harry was ready to hang on her words. Hopefully that wouldn't be literal, in a sense of jurisprudence. "You know the kinds of things cobalt-bloods can do, right?" Her voice dripped with malice, potential, ambition. He had definitely thought about the things she could do... _Focus, Harry, focus_.

"Uh, vaguely?" he said. "You're strong as hell, and aren't you like... mildly psionic or something?"

Vriska laughed. "I don't get much practice with it, since it's _horribly_ illegal, but mildly is an understatement. I'm surprised you didn't notice earlier..."

His hand flew up, and slapped Vriska across the face, hard.

Her grin grew darker, yet darker. "If I can do that to you, imagine what I can to do a troll."

"Shit, have you done that to me before?" Harry asked. Odd feelings swirled in his chest.

She cocked her head to the side, and winked. "Occasionally." His arm slowly raised once more, and gently, cautiously, stroked her cheek where he had hit it, before running its fingers through her hair. "Do you miiiiiiiind, Harry?"

Harry's heart was pounding in his chest louder than the gunfire just out of sight. "I uh, can't say that I do," he replied nervously. For a brief moment, his hand clutched her hair hard at the roots, and her eyelids fluttered. But mere moments later, his hand was back at his side, and he was back in control of it. "So, we run in there, and...?"

Vriska closed her eyes, and took a deep breath before opening them again. "I take control of someone and make them fight each other. You go in there and do the windy-voidy thing, and we minimize the causalities of this fuckery. Maybe that way, it'll be a harder sell to exterminate my fucking people. Better than nothing."

Harry stared at her. "Uh... you know that's not genetic, right?"

"Oh?" she said.

"I've never done a windy thing, or a voidy thing, let alone a "windy-voidy thing", Vris."

She looked at him as if he had just told one hell of a joke, and frankly, he wished he'd get that kind of a reaction from people more often. Just in different circumstances. "Just because you haven't done it before doesn't mean you can't do it."

Harry's eyes widened. "Dude, it's a game construct thing. We've never been in Sburb, Sgrub, any of that shit, _it is not a possible thing_."

She frowned at him. "Shut the fuck up, Harry," she said, and marched into the smoke. Harry, despite his protestations, followed.

He wasn't sure what he was expecting, perhaps nothing concrete at all, but when they finally emerged into a space of mostly clear air, permeated with the ozone-scent of recently discharged energy weapons, he was surprised to find himself on a balcony overlooking the central lobby of the hospital. The room was close enough to a square, ringed in pillars, with a statue of, _ew_, a nobly-posing Jane Crocker at its center, holding a vaguely spoon-shaped scepter of authority to the sky in a symbol of her "enlightened" rule. After all, someone influenced by one of the most terrifying leaders of the Alternian society corrupted by the influence of Lord English's minions who also grew up in an upper-middle class human household, never wanting for anything, was "enlightened" enough to truly understand the plight of the downtrodden.

In front of them was a wide-horned bronzeblood, wielding a weapon larger than any human his size could handle. Harry could imagine either the recoil ripping his shoulder off, or the waste heat reducing his hand to ashes. Beyond, there were at least a dozen other heavily armed trolls, a healthy mix of castes (as how in the world did caste matter that much in the face of Crocker's regime, he figured), all watching over what he guessed to be maybe a hundred human hostages. Three already lay dead on the floor, and a fourth was squirming in a pool of blood.

Vriska walked up behind the bronzeblood, grabbed him by the bovine horns, and snapped his neck, the light fading from his eyes as they watched the two of them from entirely the wrong side of his body.

_Fuck, she just killed someone without giving the slightest shit,_ Harry thought, in both alarm and admiration. He watched as she picked up the fallen weapon, comically large against her wiry frame, and shouldered it, resting the barrel on the balcony's bannister.

"Harry," she whispered, "Get ready."

"Wait, how do you even know how to use that thing-"

His question was wiped from existence by the _thoom_ of capacitors turning air into plasma, and plasma into a concentrated bolt, followed quickly by the wet sound of organs spilling onto the distant floor. The sound barely had time to echo before it was repeated, again and again.

The counterfire came fast and thick. Turns out, rapid fire weapons focused on a small area, used by trained professionals, saturated both the air and the architecture very, very quickly. Harry dropped to the floor, and covered his head. When he dared to look up, most of the banister, the wall behind them, and a significant portion of the floor had been converted back into their component pieces by high-energy impacts, and somehow, miraculously, Vriska was still standing there, still firing, still resting the gun on an improbably extant tiny segment of railing. She was saying something, but Harry's ears were ringing. But he could make out his name.

"Harry!"

And then, a moment later-

"Harry, do the fucking thing!"

He wrenched himself to his feet, and his planned response of "I can't do the thing, you maniac" was drowned out by the retort of gunfire that annihilated any open air between them. Jesus, she was still firing, she should be running, she was going to die-

A bolt of plasma incinerated most of the gun, and tore through Vriska's arm. She threw the ruin that once was a gun down to the first floor, and pressed the fingers of her one usable arm to her temple. Harry looked down, and saw one of the terrorists tackle another, though there were still _many_ pelting their position.

"HARRY, DO THE THING!" she screamed, the sound tearing at the edges of her vocal chords.

And well, shit, since things were so bizarre already, he gave it a try. He didn't know how _doing the windy thing_ would or should feel, but he put out his arms and gave them a bit of a dramatic flourish. This accomplished exactly nothing. A near-miss lit the arm of his jacket on fire, and he desperately patted it out.

Then, Vriska turned to him, one arm hanging limply at her side, missing some important components, and stared him dead in the eyes.

"Harry." A bolt grazed her back, and she stumbled forward before righting herself. "Do. The. Thing." Her voice was more than a command. A command told you what you should do, what you must do. This was what _was_. No argument was possible. Non-adherence was a contradiction of reality.

"Wind. Void. Annihilate them," she said, gritting her teeth.

And so, he did.

There was no gesture, no symbolic motion, no corresponding thought. Instead, he felt the air. He felt it so intensely that he could feel the gaps between the motes, the space between all relevance in the universe, and turned it into purposed destruction. What happened on the first floor was not emblematic of either element. Instead, void was carried on the wind. A breeze wafted through the room, and where it touched, what was became nothing. He deftly maneuvered around the hostages, and bloodlessly wiped the aggressors from existence.

He felt his consciousness flow, chasing the running trolls, rending them limb from limb, replacing chunks of their bodies with void. Where he could not follow, he erased walls and floors from the hospital to give him proper flow.

The power was immense. Intoxicating. For a brief moment, he was aware of his own bodily state, floating in a vortex of light and shadow, swept from the ground in a rush of air, and he redoubled his efforts, taking that feeling and focusing it into more power. Devoid of targets, now he poured his mind over the debris, the flames, the smoke. Thunderclaps issued from places all over the hospital as air rushed to close sudden gaps.

And then, as suddenly as it had came, the moment was gone. Harry was back in his body, feet gently coming to the ground.

Vriska was fine - her arm was undamaged, somehow, save for her fingernails tracing bloody streaks down them as she bared her teeth in a wide-mouthed grin. He stared at her, his eyes feeling, well, not wide, but _deep_. All this power at his fingertips... What the fuck had she just done?

<strike> The air could have split into its component parts and combusted in the heat of their mutual glare.</strike>

<strike> He didn't bother to look around them, to see the damage or what either of them had done to the world. He just walked up to her, grabbed her by the hair, pulled her head back, and kissed her. She slowly forced her head back upright, pressing her lips harder against his, sloppily taking her tongue deeper into his mouth.</strike>

<strike> When they dared to pull back enough to breath, Harry found himself with her hand around his neck, stroking his chin with her thumb. "We're going," she said, and so, they did. The hospital faded behind them without a further word, and without a further touch. To give in for even a moment now would be dangerous.</strike>

<strike> Time itself was breaking down. In flashes, they were in front of a hotel, then entering a room. The door slammed behind them, and there was no more control. No more calculated statements, no plausible deniability, no world beyond the two of them.</strike>

<strike> It felt so good to let go.</strike>

She tore a hole in the wall-

No.

Something, fundamentally, had broken.

<strike>The scene of the crime was dangerous. They had to move. Enforcer drones would be there in a matter of minutes, and regardless of the situation, Vriska would obviously be flagged as a dangerous troll in Jane's systems</strike>

<strike>They had to move, this place wasn't right</strike>

This place wasn't right at all.

They were in a hotel room, kissing, fondling, tearing off clothes

<strike>"What the hell is happening," Harry asked-</strike>

<strike>"Shut up-"</strike>

"And just kiss me, let me have this, Harry," <strike>she pleaded</strike>

<strike>They consumed each other in their transgression, not just against what was expected of them, but of something more</strike>

How many nights had they spent here?

"I don't care, Vriska, I really don't," Harry said. He meant it, and even if he didn't know, he knew.

"Me either," she replied, once her mouth was empty of him. <strike>"I think I did something," she said, finally admitting it after weeks</strike>

<strike>"No shit," Harry replied, "Don't get me wrong, I can't get enough of you. Of this. Fuck, I could be inside you for the rest of my goddamn life"</strike>

"Shut up, Harry, I swear to god, don't ruin this, <strike>I'll fucking kill you," Vriska moaned.</strike>

<strike>And he didn't, and they lay in each other's arms, and the world melted, fell away, dissipated into its meek components</strike>

And they lay in each other's arms for hours, mingled sweat, mingled minds, mingled bodies, and just <strike>breathed</strike> existed.

<strike>They didn't go home after that. They couldn't. How could anything they knew stand up to what they had seen? Experienced?</strike>

They went home the next morning - Their parents had been terrified. The attack was all over the news, and they hadn't heard from them, so of course they worried. <strike>John more than Roxy, Kanaya more than Rose, for some people have a bit more insight into where things are going.</strike>

<strike>Harry and Vriska found it difficult to speak to anyone else</strike>

Harry and Vriska found it difficult to speak to each other, afterward. <strike>They were the only ones who could understand what they had experienced</strike> They were the only ones who knew what had happened between them, and when <strike>fate bends</strike> a friendship shifts like that, there is a certain amount of awkwardness to be expected. One can't fault them for putting distance between each other <strike>out of fear.</strike>

<strike>This was supposed to be sexy. "I agree." "I'd have liked that." "Though maybe it was, and we just didn't..." "Are you starting to get it, H?"</strike>

The deaths at the hospital spawned more. Ships rained hellfire upon the communities deemed "responsible." Their witnessing <strike>their action</strike> was not to be repeated, to anyone. <strike>They knew better than to examine this, it'd</strike> They knew better than to speak up - it'd just turn them into tools of the political machinations, of rebellion and tyranny. They'd rather be fighters <strike>she'd rather tear through all of this</strike> in the coming conflict. <strike>"Harry? Can you hear me? Fuck, please tell me you can still hear me"</strike>

And, about a year later...

Everything snapped back into place.


	4. Trust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vriska and Harry come to their senses after a metaphorical bomb detonates in their relationship, and a very literal one detonates in the building they're in. This time, reality manages to hold itself together, but it leaves their situation no less complicated.

Vriska shook her head - the space between her horns, hell, everything, was throbbing, like someone had just taken a plasma cutter to the spaces between her cranial quadraspheres. Several things were quickly becoming apparent: One, she had just kissed Harry Anderson Egbert like his lips were the only thing between her and a fundamental understanding of the nature of reality. Two, she was on the ground, bleeding, and so was he, and while that was to be expected of anyone she was going to kiss, this was indicative of something else entirely. That thing was, three, the large explosion whose concussive blast they had just been subjected to, which was likely causing both the ringing in her ears and the klaxons in the distance that were just beginning to become defined in her qualia. She attempted to move - Yep, everything was still, as far as she could tell, attached.

Once she pulled herself to her feet, she checked on Egbert. He was tougher than he gave himself credit for, and when he just moaned vaguely at her insistence that he stand up, she slapped him across the face, grabbed him by the arm, and pulled him to his feet.

"Are you done?" she asked.

Harry dusted himself off. "Yeah, I think so." He looked around, at the swirling dust and smoke illuminated by pulsing red emergency lights. "Can we do that again?"

Vriska raised her considerable eyebrows. "Kissing, or exploding?"

He cocked his head, and then broke into a smile. "Either, really."

She laughed. "How about both?"

Despite the detachment offered by their mutual jabs, she could notice his growing blush. "I have no idea what you mean by that. Is it weird that I don't really care?"

Vriska conspicuously bore a fang on the left side of her mouth, pressing it hard into her bottom lip. "That's just how I want you to feel." She whipped around, her voluminous black hair streaking behind her. "Now, are you going to keep following me?"

And she walked off.

Of course he'd follow her. She didn't even have to look back. That was a relief - that she could trust him. It freed up precious resources, ones that were now tied up in figuring out just what was going on. Human hospital, troll neighborhood, during a peak of political and social unrest - though just about every new day was a new peak of that - there was a pretty good chance that this was a terrorist attack, either a false flag (hopefully) or a legitimate move by some misguided trolls who didn't realize just what they'd truly accomplished. As she strode forward, she held out her hand behind her, and sure enough, there was Harry, waiting to grab on, keeping pace.

There was a degree of bifurcation necessary to both walk and send one's mind out into the ether, but she had been practicing. She felt Harry shiver as her psychic energies coursed through him, but they left him alone quickly enough. What she was looking for was, well, minds of trolls. Aggressive ones. There couldn't be many in this hospital, considering their quality of care for her. And sure enough, there were about a dozen, several hundred feet away in what she assumed was the lobby, spread out over two floors - maybe a mezzanine and the main concourse?

"I felt that, Vris, what's up?" Harry asked, oblivious.

"You know how I can control minds?"

He nodded. "Yeah, I think you've pranked me enough with it for me to remember."

"I'm figuring out what we're up against."

Harry kept walking with her, but he squeezed her hand. "What we're _up against?_ Are you planning on, uh, fighting whoever did this?"

She stopped briefly at a set of doors that had been knocked off their hinges, but which still obscured the path ahead. With her free hand, she dug her claws into one of them, and tore it to the ground.

"Harry, have you ever known me to back away from a fight?"

"Not really, but uh... taking on people with bombs? Really?"

She hissed under her breath. "Whatever they have, I'm me, I can take them."

"What about me?"

She laughed. Wasn't that obvious? "Harry, your biological parents are literal gods. You have access to the aspects of wind and void."

Suddenly, Vriska felt a tug on her arm. Harry had stopped walking. He was staring at her, with a look of bleak concern on his face.

"That's... that's not how that works."

She dropped his hand, and sneered. For all she appreciated about him, Harry could be a complete idiot sometimes.

"Have you even tried?" she asked.

To her surprise, he nodded. "I mean... when you've got my parents to live up to, you kind of fantasize about it sometimes, right? But wishes don't make something real."

Vriska rolled her eyes. It was obvious that he had powers. _She_ had powers. It would only be correct for him to, as well. Otherwise, how could he accompany her? There were _rules_ to these things.

"You must be doing it wrong."

"I-" Harry started. "What?" He seemed utterly flabbergasted.

She really had to lead him to everything, didn't she? "Think of it just like my own powers. When I'm controlling someone's mind, I'm not thinking, "oh, move your arm this way, walk here, do this, do that" like some kind of pleb. Instead..." she paused. There were right words for this, and wrong words for this. Commit, Vriska. Commit.

She grabbed him by the chin, her nails digging into his cheeks.

"I know, I feel, in the core of my being, that whatever I want my subject to do is _the only way things could ever be_. It isn't my desire. It is reality, and the only reality that could possibly exist. Your powers are the same, Harry."

She could feel him try to shake his head in a conversational response, but that was attenuated by her grasp. "Okay, okay, even _if_ I had powers, and even _if_ I could use them, can you at least tell me what's going on?"

She explained what she had observed. Troll separatists, angry, and frankly, it fit well into both of their geopolitical understandings of the world. They both understood that an attack like this would be, in a word, awful, not just for the human cost, but for the reaction.

But she could still feel him hesitating.

"Haaaaaaaarry..." she purred. She could sense him stiffen, both in his spine, and in other ways. "You know me. You like me. You trust me."

His eyes were growing wide, and his smile was growing a bit manic. "Fuck yes, I do, Vris."

She felt a shiver run up her horns. "Good. Then trust that I know what I'm doing. You like following my lead, don't you?" She put a bit of pressure on the bottom of his chin with her claws, feeling her pointer hook ever so slightly into his jawbone. His eyelids fluttered, and he closed the gap between them. He opened his mouth to say "Yes", but the words dissipated into her lips. Kissing him was like drinking blood, and feeling his words vibrate into nothingness in her mouth was like feeling a life ebb out between her teeth.

When she withdrew from him, she cracked her neck, and resumed her course towards the source of trouble. She didn't have to look to feel him following.

There was a strategic way of doing things - the way one would approach a hostage situation with armed troll terrorists with an unknown variety of hemospectral powers and possible mutations. There was also the realistic way of doing things - the way you'd approach such a situation with the awareness that you, and the person you were with, were both still of high school age, and you were both had a hell of a lot to learn about the world, if the ignorance of your immortal god-kings gave you anything resembling a scale of "years alive" to "vaguely correct knowledge".

Vriska felt like neither.

She leaned back on one leg, and in rapid succession, kicked both of the last doors between her and Harry and the lobby off their hinges. In front of them, on the now-exposed mezzanine, a near-adult (judging by his skin tone) bronzeblood with a weapon thicker than Vriska's torso gaped at them.

"Who the fuck are you kids? Get out of here, this isn't-" he started, but she wasn't listening.

"Your new boss, bitch," she said. God, she loved dropping one-liners. Pity her victims didn't often play along. With a minimum of effort, she slipped into his mind. Bluh. It felt so _awkward_ having such large horns. but she spun him around, and took aim at whoever he felt his comrades were. Those comrades had guns drawn on a bunch of humans, and luckily, none of those humans were corpses yet. Maybe if these trolls were incompetent enough to shoot each other, the crackdown would be less intense...

She/he pulled the trigger. Once more, and yet again. Four trolls were reduced to wriggling piles of fluids before the return fire came, and a fifth was turned to ash before her temporary ward took terminal damage. Time to take another mind.

But as she was jolted, harshly, back to her own body, she saw Harry, standing stiff as a board.

"Well, what are you waiting for, nerd?"

He blinked at her. "I..."

"Trust me," she said, as she once again bifurcated her mind, and slipped into another troll on the opposite side of the mezzanine. A mustardblood, without psionic powers, sadly, but their pistol would do. She opened fire.

"Do the thing, Harry."

Harry did not do the thing. This was not acceptable. It was difficult, to say the least, to control two bodies at once, but she wheeled around, awkwardly, and slapped him across the face, and screamed.

"DO IT, HARRY!" Her claws had left bright red streaks that began dripping down his cheek.

For the second time that day, several dramatic things coincided.

Harry fell to his knees, while a rustblood tore Vriska's victim's leg off. It was unfortunate that she could feel it so clearly - it was throwing her aim off. But the air pressure in the room changed.

Part of it was because a squadron of Crocker drones had just burst in through a wall, exposing the room to the sky. Their bright red chitin, their soulless eyes, their... Fuck, she hated that they were, in some bizarre way, of the same lineage. A monstrosity of non-volitional existence shouldn't share a shred of heritage with her.

But there was another part to it.

The air was no longer working solely by the laws of physics.

No longer by the dictates of reality.

"YES!" she yelled, her voice running ragged along the edges. "FUCKING DO IT, EGBERT!"

A thunderclap. Air deleted, then the rest racing to fill the gap. Grasp the principle of it, you fucker, _do it, nerd_.

She saw the rest not through her eyes, but through the eyes of the mustardblood, who was careening over the railing, on a one-way journey to the ground floor. Vortexes of air, whirling so tightly that the moisture in them was expunged, forming tiny cloud-like streaks, shot out through the room. The belligerents - well, the trolls, at least, the targets that Vriska had engaged - had their throats encased it in. They were alarmed, though not harmed, by this.

Then, the air pulled tighter, and turned to void. The air that rushed in to fill the gap was as sharp as a knife. Heads fell to the floor with a wet slap.

She released her hold on the yellow. Harry was grimacing, but fuck, he had done it.

"Let go," she commanded, and he did, falling to one knee.

He looked up at her. "What... what did I just do?"

Vriska laughed. This felt so goddamn good. "You listened, you fucking idiot." She grabbed him by the throat, and pulled him back upright. Rather than responding, his mouth just hung open. More than anything, he looked drunk. This amused her. Maybe she was, a bit, too, so it was only fair.

"You like the taste of power, Harry?" She licked her lips, before lingering on a fang.

"I... I didn't know, Vris," he said, apologizing for, presumably, something. That hardly mattered now. He had done it. It was real now.

"Follow," she said, flicking her hand down from his throat to his bicep, allowing herself a tighter grip. She couldn't waste time on more words, and he knew better than to deny her. They walked, together, step in step, arm in arm, back down the hallway away from the mezzanine, the world even more of a blur than fire, dust, debris, and sirens could distort. She let go of her self-control just a bit, and felt the edges of his mind, and cackled.

_You're not holding back anymore, are you?_

She could _feel_ his response.

_No._

"Is this how you feel all the time?" Harry asked, as Vriska shoved him backwards into a broom closet. She slammed the door shut, and in two quick opposing strokes, tore off his shirt, and ran her claws down his ribs.

"Only around you, you fucker," she hissed, and bit at his neck. His hand came up, and gently cupped her cheek. _Gently?_ She flushed with rage, and then his hand slid back, his fingers entwining in her hair. And he pulled. Hard.

She moaned. "You're learning, cunt," she whispered, her whole body tensing.

"Cunt?" he replied, smirking. "You've picked up a lot about humans, haven't you?" His hands wandered up to her horns. _Fuck_, she thought. His tight grip on them was... intense - It's not like humans should know how that felt, she reminded herself, but also, it meant he could control where her head went...

"Shut up,' she retorted. "As if you haven't read about trolls and thought of me, cock in hand"- she had meant it as an insult, but the words, and the image were, at the moment, delicious.

Harry's fingers relented, and slipped down to her shoulders. "Maybe. Show me," he growled.

She leaned forward, and bit his lip, drawing blood. "Careful. I might choke you on it."

He smiled, a rivulet of bright red running down his chin. "Good luck with that. Take your fucking pants off."

Fuck, she liked this side of him.

She licked the blood off his chin. "Don't have to tell me twice," she said, unzipping her jeans. "You're desperate."

He slipped his hands into the space between her jeans, her panties, and her skin, riding the line of her hips. She was thin enough that it nearly slid them both off her, but she cocked a thigh out. This was her goddamn show.

"You are, too. I bet you want a taste."

She slid her jeans off, and more peeled than slid off her panties. They were soaked. Damn human fashion industry not making materials more suited for troll erotic needs. They had been the only thing holding back her bulge from the open air, and it tingled, the tip of it flicking around involuntarily. She ran her fingers up it, drawing a full helping of viscous, cerulean fluid from it. Vriska ran her fingers along Harry's lips, waiting for just the slightest part before she shoved them in his mouth. He sucked her juices right off her fingers, before nibbling just a bit on the tip of her index.

"Tastes like you, Vris."

"Are you saying I smell like I jerk off a lot, nerd?"

Harry started tugging at her shirt, and she lifted up her arms, expecting him to pull it free. Instead, he let it catch on her horns, and let the fabric blind her, using it to push her back against the wall with one hand. The other was around her hip, and he was running his tongue over her rumble- fuck, she was getting it on with a human, might as well use their terms - breasts. For a brief moment, she felt concerned that he'd mind that she didn't have those human nipple things, but as he moaned into them, she realized that was not, at all, on his mind.

She took it off the rest of the way herself.

Harry smirked. "You want to be naked that badly?"

"Fuck you."

"And yeah, maybe I am saying that," he continued.

_Seriously, fuck you, Harry_, she thought, and tore his pants open. The button, and a fragment of zipper, rebounded off the wall, and tore a bit of skin off her hip. _So that's what a cock looks like_.

Her bulge had its own agenda, and the tip of it started wrapping itself around the head of Harry's cock. _Fuck, that's firm, what the hell will that do to my nook?_ she wondered, dripping with anticipation.

"Harry, I do, every goddamn day, thinking of your stupid fucking face," she said, and kissed him, pressing him into the wall.

And he pressed back against her. She was strong as hell - human muscles weren't shit compared to what a troll could bring to bear, let alone someone of moderately high caste like Vriska - but he outweighed her, and as she slipped her pants off her ankles, she was off-balance. His hands were around her bare ass, lifting her into the air. God damnit, she was supposed to be in charge-

She could feel the heat of his erection, the beat of his blood pumping in and out of it, pressed against her bulge, pinned upwards against her. Shit, that was pretty far - Fuck, she didn't care about who topped at this point, she just wanted to see what that thing felt like inside her. He couldn't be blamed for being a few inches off; she was pretty sure she was the first troll to get in his pants. One hand grabbed his cock by the base - _Huh, those are testicles, they'll be slapping against my ass in a second -_ and guided it, while her other hand pressed against his shoulders. He got the hint, lifting her a bit higher, and she-

They moaned together as he entered her.

"Fuck, you're so soft," he said.

"You're so fucking har-" She couldn't even finish the sentence, as he started thrusting. Holy shit, a nook was meant to take some serious punishment, but bulges were _pliable_, how the fuck did human females handle this shit - she let out a noise that was part moan, part gasp, part scream, and her eyes rolled back in her head. Involuntarily, she clawed at his back, feeling the skin tear just a little.

"You okay, Vris-" he started-

"Don't you fucking dare stop, Harry-" she said, and oh god he didn't. Her bulge was scrambling for purchase, and found it around his balls, around the bit of shaft that exposed itself on the backside of every thrust, and it hurt, but fuck, it hurt so _good_.

"Fuck, Harry, I'm-" she gasped, her whole body tensing.

A gush of cobalt fluid spilled out of her, dripping down her thighs, and her bulge went numb. Her nook... How was Harry still...

"Shit, Vris, you're so fucking _wet_," he said, astonishment in his voice.

"I-" Words were difficult. "You're-" C'mon, Vriska, you can do this. "Are you close?" she said. Three words was about the best she could do, circumstances permitting.

He bit at her neck. "You're so slick, Vris. I could probably-" _Cum?_ "Keep going for another couple minutes." _Oh for fucks sake-_

Vriska came again. Her whole body was twitching, and she was losing her sense of direction. Had he let her down onto the floor? Her ankles were behind her horns, and he was thrusting away and she did not want this to ever fucking stop-

"Harry-" she said, in-between moans. "This isn't fair-"

"But it's fun," he said, and pinned her shoulders to the floor.

She couldn't disagree with that.

Her bulge, wrapping around his balls and shaft, was the only part of her still cognizant enough to feel him tensing up. It had been teasing at him this whole time, and the feeling sent a shockwave up through Vriska, hard enough to pull her back to reality for just a moment. She remembered where her arms were, and pulled one up, grabbing his hair and shoving his mouth towards hers in a sloppy, passionate, insane kiss. Neither had much in the way of fine motor control in that moment, as she felt him grow even harder. She could feel just a slight bit of his fluids pump into her, but the firmness of his cock as he did so - There had to be some good shit to troll fucking, but this felt so goddamn good.

They collapsed in a heap, and from the combined exertion of sudden intense sexuality and exerting nigh-magical powers upon the world in rapid succession, they passed out with little protest.

She woke up some time later, in a darkened supply closet, with Harry Anderson Egbert still somewhat inside her. She blinked.

_Vriska Lalonde, what the hell did you just do?_

So much of what she remembered made somewhere between zero and zero-within-a-reasonable-system-of-rounding sense. So much worked within her personal fantasies, but how much of that, realistically, could have actually happened?

She nudged at the mostly naked Harry Anderson Egbert entangled with her. He made a grumbling noise, and came awake.

"Harry?"

"Yeah?" he answered, before nuzzling himself into her chest.

"How... how much of that actually happened?"

He pulled his head back, and looked at her. Then, down to the puddle around where they were connected, and back up to her eyes. "I guess I didn't dream that." He slid out of her, and they both started getting dressed, shell-shocked.

Harry's clothes were stained in cerulean fluid, as were Vriska's, though her shirt also had a conspicuous streak of white on it. Mechanistically, she dressed herself.

"I think... I think we actually did that, didn't we?" she said.

"Yeah," Harry confirmed. "We did. God damn, we really did."

Something was nagging at the edges of Vriska's mind. "But... what else?"

Harry looked around the room, pulling on the torn remnants of his shirt. Man, that thing was partially white before... Then, his eyes went wide.

"Oh, fuck, Vris."

She started to remember what had led up to that moment. She pulled on her shirt, pulled up her pants, and threw open the door.

"Vris, babe-"

She looked into the open air, and started walking.

"Maybe we shouldn't... I mean, we're obviously-"

From the flow of the air, she could feel, she could smell, that the building opened onto the street just down the hall. She kept walking.

"People will know we just-"

And she was on the sidewalk. The hospital was missing a significant portion of wall here, and while emergency service personel were swarming the scene, something else dominated her vision. Across the street, on a monitor thirty feet wide, was the face of Jane Crocker.

"Fuck," Vriska said.

"What?" Harry said, before his eyes fell upon the monitor.

"-this, we _must_ take the responsible course of action! It is no good for trolls nor man to live like this! Clearly, trollkind must be taken under our benevolent wing, before its inherent violent nature harms both humans and itself. A tragedy like this is unacceptable just once, and it will happen more and more often until we implement a _solution_ for these disaffected trolls! From this day forth, I will be ruling more directly over all my subjects, man and troll alike. I will take it upon myself to watch over you, and to bring peace to us all." Her eyes flicked to the side briefly. "That sounded about right, right?" she said quietly, before looking back at the camera. "Through enforcement of law and order, there will be peace in our time!" Then, the video feed cut out, with the logo of Crocker's government - a spoon with three piles of wrapped gifts in it, helpfully labeled "Civility", "Peace", and "Authority".

"Oh. Oh fuck," Harry concluded.

This, Vriska thought, was the most politically perceptive thing he had said in weeks.


	5. Fallout, Part One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The world is a rubber band. Sometimes in twisting, it powers transformation, and sometimes, it snaps. It all depends on the attachment points, and how twisted it gets.

Weeks had passed.

It wasn't like Harry had had a... _normal_ life before this. It wasn't like he had a proper barometer for "normal". But whatever normal was, it certainly wasn't this.

After the attack on the Florida Memorial Hospital - it was easy to name things _something something Memorial_ when you had a civilization built on the corpses of two entire universes - The world had undergone a fundamental shift. It all came quickly. A curfew was established, on both humans and trolls under the age of twenty-one (measured, of course, in human years), and Crocker drone patrols were now a regular sight on every street. Neither Harry nor Vriska, due to their... unique... lineages, regularly attended school, but educational institutions were suspended in their operations, pending the restructuring of education based along Crocker-approved lines. Public transportation was guarded by Crocker police, and social media was on lockdown, discussion of seditious and rebellious topics attracting nigh-instantaneous bans. Harry supposed that at least it was nice that Vriska's paranoias were being proven correct.

There wasn't much more he could know.

He'd tried contacting her, but she responded sporadically, and without much detail. He was worried, of course, so the mere fact that she'd respond was reassuring, but there was so much more that was going on. Harry didn't know why, but he had lost all desire to respond to messages from other people. He had made plenty of... Acquaintances over the years, people who knew him through this and that, but he didn't want to speak to them.

He had a hard enough time explaining what had happened to himself.

As much as Vriska's absence had clawed deep ruts in his emotional stability, he still kept himself active. Mom and Dad hadn't let him leave the house - "It was too dangerous", the constant refrain went, and he didn't know enough to argue otherwise. But alone, he still had something to confront.

No matter what he did, no matter how he directed his mind, he couldn't replicate what had happened back in the hospital. He could channel neither wind nor void, and after countless attempts, he began to question his own memory. Perhaps it would be useful to talk to his parents about it - but he wasn't about to bring that tidbit into their lives. It still made zero sense, except in Vriska's fucked up mind, and it twisted him in knots to think that...

That anything from there on out actually happened.

Harry sat in his room, and tried to text Vriska.

"Hey."

No response, of course. "Can we talk? I need to talk with you, please," he added. Pleading was undignified, but... still...

"What does talking matter

"Shouldn't you be able to feel me

"Still

"You can see it, right"

Her responses came faster than Harry could react, but he didn't known how to react to any of it. She was scaring him, as usual.

"Please, Vris," he said. It wasn't the kind of statement that would help, but he tried anyway.

"You don't see it do you

"None of them do

"I'll break out

"I'll tear through

"You've seen what I can do

"You've seen what we can do

"We can beat this"

Vriska had been like this before. Harry had seen it time and time again, and the force of nature she became when she let her demons consume her was intoxicating. Sometimes, he thought he'd give anything to be swept up in its torrents. Sometimes, it felt like her words, her motions, her gaze, could burn through the boundaries of reality, and like that was all that mattered.

But right now, they were bound to the world they inhabited.

And all he wanted was one real conversation with her. This had never lasted this long before, and while he trusted her parents to take care of her, he wasn't sure they were equipped to deal with something quite like what she was experiencing.

And so, Harry, at dinner that night, resolved to ask a question.

He hadn't had dinner with his father in... six months, maybe. It was always just his mother, and her store-bought meals, though Harry didn't mind. Normally, they always had something or other to talk about, even if it didn't mean anything, and they had pretty similar tastes in food, so it all worked out.

Tonight, though, Harry couldn't say much of anything.

She noticed.

"Hey, kiddo," she said, poking at a bit of gravy-soaked corn with a plastic fork. "You okay?"

_I guess we're starting now, aren't we._

"No," he said.

Roxy let the fork down gently. "I kind of noticed."

"Has Dad?"

She nodded. "I think so, yeah. You wanna talk about it?"

Harry closed his eyes.

"Yeah," he lied. It was less that he wanted to. More that he had to.

She cocked her head, looking at him with all the attentiveness that a son could want. "Do you want your father to be a part of this?"

He nodded. It wouldn't be much of a confrontation if they weren't all there, would it now?

Roxy blinked out of existence, and a floor above, Harry heard knocking on the door of his father's study. Funny, that. If Harry understood anything about the nature of her powers, she could have just shown up past the door, but still she maintained a bit of decorum... or had some respect for his wishes.

Then, she was back in the dining room, smiling painfully at Harry. "He'll be down in a minute, kiddo." With that, she walked over to a cabinet, and poured herself some wine.

_That bad, huh?_ Harry thought, but he didn't dare to say it. Instead, he sat there, not reacting, until both his father and mother were sitting at the table in front of him. The three of them formed a Y across the circular table, and he felt like he was subject to some kind of interrogation.

John was... Well, he was still Harry's father. But the stubble on his cheeks was starting to thicken into a beard, and while Harry didn't have the keenest sense of smell, it vaguely agreed with the grime he could see in achieving a conclusion that John hadn't showered in days. And his eyes were sunken in their sockets. Shit, it looked like he had aged a decade in the last year. No wonder his mom was pouring some wine.

"Hey," John said.

"Hey," Harry replied. At least that much was normal.

"So, things aren't great, huh?" he said.

"No," Harry replied.

"Do you want to tell us more about that?" Roxy added, sipping her wine. It wouldn't look right to really knock it back, but that sip lasted far longer than someone drinking merely for the fun of it.

Harry sighed. He knew his primary concern, but he couldn't just go there immediately. There was so much to unpack.

"This is all so wrong," he said.

"I know," John answered, reflexively.

Harry blinked. "Then why-"

"You know your aunt," Roxy interjected. "She's doing what she thinks is right. It might be painful now, but it might be for the best in the long run."

"That's..." Harry tried to gather his thoughts. "That's bullshit, and you know it. I know you, mom."

Roxy took a long swig of her wine before responding. "I don't know much about governance, and neither do you. If you think something's wrong with it, you should probably take it up with her. She'd love to see you, you know?"

John was staring out into the distance, not looking at anything in particular.

"It's wrong that I'm kept from seeing my friends. She wouldn't listen even if I gave her a twenty-page argument outlining every way in which she was wrong, mom."

Roxy smiled sadly. "You don't know until you try, kiddo."

Harry opened his mouth to reply, but he was silenced by John slamming his hand on the table. Slamming wasn't the exact right word, perhaps - more like strongly placing his hand down, enough that it could be heard, but without violence.

"Change is a dangerous thing, Harry," he said, which shut up his mother entirely. None of them spoke for about a minute - As if they were both afraid - before John continued.

"Your aunt may be wrong, Harry, but..." his words dropped off into a sigh, and the two of them waited until John found it in him to finish the sentence. "We have to just keep going."

_That was fucking stupid_, Harry thought. "Why do you two keep covering for her? You're fucking gods. You made this world. Why won't you make it right?"

Roxy slammed her glass on the table, wine spilling everywhere. "WE TRY-" she began, but she was cut off by a sound neither of them had heard in years.

John was laughing.

They looked at each other, back at John, and back again.

John kept laughing, till tears formed in his eyes.

"Make it right?"

Roxy gawked at him. "John, I-"

"Make it right? That can't happen."

And John stood up, and walked out of the room. His footsteps on the stairs echoed throughout the house, followed by the sound of the large oaken door of his study slamming shut.

Harry and Roxy stared at each other, jaws clenched. She passed him her glass, and he pushed it back across the table. She gave him a look, and knocked back the rest of it.

"It's only going to get worse, mom," Harry said, breaking the tense silence.

Her eyes flicked to where John was, above them. "We can't know that."

Harry swallowed. This had rapidly fallen out of his control. "Please, let me go see her."

"I can't-"

"I'm scared for her, mom."

Roxy sighed, and ran her fingers through her hair, bringing it into disarray. "Rose and Kanaya are good people. They'll protect her, whatever happens, Harry."

And with that, Harry gave up.

His parents were not going to understand, as much as he wanted them to. They were obviously dealing with their own problems, and he was barely equipped to deal with his own, let alone Vriska's, let alone theirs.

And so, he went to his room, and texted a message he knew he shouldn't. She wasn't stable. This couldn't be good for her. But he needed this. He needed to be by her side. If anyone was going to ride this out with her, with him, it was the two of them.

"Everything is awful. I need to see you."

It only took moments for a reply to vibrate his phone to life.

"Me too. I'll find a way."

In his gut, Harry felt terrified and relieved. If he knew anything of her, she'd find him. The world was falling apart, but they'd ride it out together.


	6. Fallout, Part Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Seer of Light makes for problematic family.

Vriska Lalonde was not having a good day.

It didn't matter much that that was the case every day. She didn't like it. She didn't like that she was confined to her room, she didn't like what was happening outside it, and she really didn't like that she couldn't feel a damn thing other than a pervasive sense of everything being completely wrong.

Roughly two weeks had passed since the incident at the hospital, and nothing she had said, no piece of communication she had put out to anyone seemed to get through. Harry wasn't understanding her, and her other friends were useless. They were so far from seeing how things actually were that to even attempt to bring them up to speed was a waste of time. And her parents, her guardians? They were just in her way.

Her room was well-appointed - concrete walls poured to carve a definitive space out of the caverns they lived in, where Kanaya and Rose spun their genetic engineering, their project of restoring her race, despite how such a project appeared to the powers that reigned above. There was both a recupercoon and a bed there - so that she could choose to self-regulate her moods. The sopor slime that dulled a troll's violent instincts was not a moral necessity. It was an option. It was an experiment to be undertaken, and Vriska was pleased that her parents had given her the daily choice, rather than prescribing something to her.

The movie posters decorating the walls were more of objects of shame than anything else. Nothing there was representative of anything more recent than a version of herself from four years ago. Some were ironic choices. Others were legitimate fascinations cloaked in an aura of irony - Pirates of the Carribean, for one, spoke to her, the idea of a fallen individual taking on an adventure past the end of their own story, becoming a Han Solo to some other protagonist - She stopped in her train of thought. Man, Harry really had been a major influence on her, hadn't he?

This room full of knick-knacks and souvineers, of trophies and sporting equipment, of educational certificates and books, used to be an _anchor._ It used to hold her down, or hold her hand. Now, she felt like she floated, rebounding off these walls...

Vriska crawled across the room, away from her computer desk, and pressed her ear to the door. She could feel it in her bones that her mothers were talking about her, about her strange behavior of late, and Vriska was, as usual, not entirely wrong.

Kanaya's voice was the first she heard.

"Do You Think We Should Consider Medication?" The perfectly cut and enunciated syllables were unmistakable.

"Not necessarily," Rose responded. "I mean, I style myself as a psychotherapist, but I wouldn't consider myself an actual expert in the biochemical expression of mental states in humans, let alone trolls."

"I Am Not An Expert Either, But You Know How Her Predecessor Became. There Is Latent Instability In Her Genome. This Could Be Part Of A Larger Trend, Not A Momentary Fluctuation, Rose."

There was a loud sigh.

"Kanaya, maybe she's just angry about legitimate issues, and that's wrecking havoc with the normal teenage progression of emotional development. None of us were even remotely normal."

"I Am Just Worried."

"I get that. And that's why we need to talk to her."

And with that, there was a forceful knocking on Vriska's door. In a motion lacking any dignity, she recoiled from it, and scrambled to affix herself in her high-backed computer chair.

"May We Come In?" Kanaya asked. Her tone was often so sweet with Vriska.

"Yeah," she responded, making sure to stare at the internet browser on her monitor as if she had been intently using it. The door _wooshed_ open - _a sci-fi bullshit door_, as Harry often put it, and Vriska allowed a count of three seconds before she took her hand off her mouse, and spun around to meet her parents.

Kanaya and Rose had swept their way into her room - Kanaya smiling at her with the slight greenish blush of one pushing themselves emotionally, and Rose averting her eyes. Both were immaculately elegant, as they always were, adorned in multi-layered configurations of dresses and skirts and scarves and all sorts of fashion accoutrements that Vriska could never bring herself to care about. In particular, the gently geometric pattern of Kanaya's skirt was disrupted as it bunched up against a discarded soda can that lay on Vriska's floor.

Kanaya met her gaze. "We Are Worried About You, Vriska."

"You shouldn't be," she replied, flicking her eyes downward. _Vision eightfold_ wasn't, by any means, magic, but the extra detail in her left eye wasn't welcome in assessing the emotional state of her parents.

"Why Not?" Kanaya continued. There was a nervous vibration underlying the question. Vriska was permanently conflicted about the legacy of her namesake - There was an intimidation factor to sharing that name, that body, but at the same time, that intimidation was not _earned_.

Vriska kept her eyes to the floor. "Because there's more important things going on right now, mom."

With that, Rose stepped between Kanaya and Vriska, and somehow, the focus of the room shifted to her. It was a subtle thing, but Vriska felt it in the basest fabric of her being.

"See, Kanaya? She's thinking exactly the same way all the rest of us are, and that's perfectly natural." Rose paused for a moment, realizing just how it sounded, speaking _about _Vriska despite her being right there. "I understand that you're having a rough go of things, Vriska, and I understand that you want to take action. But if you just stay the course, things will work out in the end. Just because things are bad now doesn't mean they'll continue to be that way."

Vriska winced. She wanted to keep her mouth shut right now. Desperately.

She failed.

"This world is just _wrong_, mom, and I know you see it. I can feel that it's all wrong, that there isn't a _right_, there isn't a _right-side-up_ or _upside-down_ or anything, we're all topsy-turvy, god I'm speaking in pure Egbert aren't I, but I know you both have something to you that can understand all of this," Vriska paused only just, to catch her breath. Everything was wrong. It wasn't just the way things had been working out lately, but it was something well beyond that. Nothing felt _real_, and she knew just how strange that sounded. How could something feel unreal in the context of reality? How could something be more real than reality? How could there be a supra-reality, could there even be- "and it's not right, not just because of what's been happening, but something else, I don't know what it is but it's wrong and I-"

In the middle of her rambling, Rose leaned over, a mysterious smile on her face, her eyes obscured by that orange hood that she so often worse, and she pressed her hand to Vriska's forehead.

Vriska blinked.

Her mothers were standing there. Kanaya radiant and beautiful, smiling despite her own worries, jet-black lipstick cutting a perfect arc across her glowing skin. Rose drawing the same contrast, but between closeness and abstraction, her perfectly manicured hand so gently caressing her forehead between Vriska's horns, pushing back her bangs, while being an avatar of knowledge infinite and incomprehensible. One in black and red, the other in yellow and orange, both glowing equally with power and love.

The world around the three of them was just as clear - the room of her childhood and adolescence, full of memories both happy and sad, soaked in history just as their hive was in general, re-created from half-held memories of a world long gone by, as clear as day and yet held so tenuously by the memories of those who were once children when it all fell away. Shielded from the light of the sun, despite its human-friendly rays, to please the troll side, and bathing in the light of knowledge despite hiding in the dark, to please that self-defined human curiosity.

Vriska felt nauseous.

These thoughts weren't natural.

Rose had done something.

Fuck. She had _Seer of Light_'d her entire shit, hadn't she? Like that would bring her back to reality... Well, it had. But _fuck that complete thing_.

"The FUCK did you just do, mom?" Vriska demanded.

The residual effects of it still sat in her mind, and she could _feel-_ _"I don't know why it hasn't been as effective lately, but I really thought she wouldn't have noticed that. It's like it's being sapped away from me... though I don't mind that much, this was more of a burden than anything-" "Why Would You Force Your Mindset On Her, She Was Only - Well, I Suppose I Understand"_

Vriska shook her head. "No, don't," she said, as Kanaya and Rose opened their mouths. "Let me guess," she continued. "You know just how bullshit all this is, and you know that _something_ will make it all work out, right?"

"Yes," Kanaya said. "We Have It Handled, And You Do Not Need To Risk Yourself."

Rose choked briefly, and Vriska jumped on it.

"I fucking knew it. You've been planning for a moment like this."

"So?" Rose interjected. It always amazed Vriska how quickly her mom could regain control. "There's causes worth fighting for, and we've known what ours were for a long time."

"So what, exactly, are you going to do?" Vriska asked.

There was only silence.

Ten, twenty, thirty seconds passed.

Vriska rolled her eyes. "You don't need to tell me. I've paid attention. Vantas has been planning for this day for fucking years, hasn't he? I'm going to go fight for this."

This sentiment was not appreciated. Kanaya's fingernails visibly dug into palms, jade blood pooling at their tips, and Rose's whole body tensed, her posture suddenly rigid.

"No, You Are Not." Kanaya said.

"No, you're staying here, and we'll handle it," Rose added.

Vriska didn't fucking care at this point. Yeah, maybe they'd stick by their word. But what was the point in a life where you waited for other people to take action for you? She was going to go out there and change the world. Grab Harry, find Karkat Vantas, kill the ever-loving fuck out of Crocker and anyone who supported her, and fix this shit. It was just that simple, right?

Vriska stood up, and shouldered her way past her parents.

"Nah, I'm out," she said, and expected to get past them quickly.

But there was a hand on her shoulder.

"Don't. Please."

It was Rose. She was looking at her, with... Tears in her eyes? That was new.

Vriska grabbed her mother's hand, and removed it from her shoulder. "I'm going where I want, and you can't stop me."

"Please, please don't," Rose pleaded. Her voice was cracking, and she was pawing at Vriska's shirt. Vriska stopped in her tracks. This was not right.

"Rose, What Is Happening? Are You All Right?" Kanaya said. Rose just kept clutching at Vriska, her hands now holding on the ends of her overshirt. Vriska shook her head, and tried to walk out the door of her room.

"No!" Rose screamed. Tears were streaming down her face.

"Rose What Is Happening Please Stop This I Need You To Be Okay-"

"Mom," Vriska said, flatly. This display... this emotional display... It was a clear act of manipulation. It disgusted her. "I'm getting Harry, I'm finding Vantas, and you can't stop me."

"Rose Are You Okay Please Address Me-"

Rose clenched her teeth, and clawed at her hair. She looked, more than anything, _infuriated_. "You don't fucking understand."

Vriska looked at her. _She_ didn't understand? That was rich. The two made eye contact.

"Really, mom?"

Suddenly, Rose grabbed her arm. Humans weren't nearly as strong as trolls, but her nails dug into Vriska's flesh, painfully. "You stupid fucking child, you _don't understand what you're doing_."

And in that moment, Vriska did.

"Rose, What Are You Talking About?"

Vriska laughed, right in front of her mother's tears. "I'm doing it, aren't I? You can see what's happening, and I'm fucking doing it. Tell me I'm right," she said, a shark-tooth grin spreading across her face.

Rose was biting her lip, and red blood blossomed against her pearly teeth. "Vriska, please, stop, god damnit, please, _stop._" She looked up at Vriska, terror in her eyes. "I've _done this_, I've walked this road and it doesn't end well,"

"What Is Happening?"

Vriska couldn't believe it. She knew _exactly_ what was happening. Twist the knife, kiddo.

"You stopped though, didn't you?"

Rose blinked. "What?"

Vriska smiled. "You stopped. Don't think I didn't ask around. I know what you did in Sburb. Your friends rule the goddamn world. You think your life isn't world fucking history? I know what you tried to do."

Her mother was wild-eyed. Her control was fraying. So, however, was Vriska's, and she was well past caring.

_"And I know you stopped before you could finish the job."_

Rose collapsed, sobbing. "I-, I-," she stammered, but she couldn't get any further than that. She couldn't form a coherent word, and Kanaya clutched at her fervently, holding her like the last handhold in a world gone mad.

Kanaya's tone was flat. "What Did You Do?"

Vriska looked at her. Did that even warrant a response? She brought it on herself.

"What Did You Do To Her?"

Rose was still convulsing with tears and sobbing, and Kanaya sat on the floor, holding her love in her arms. She looked up at Vriska, bewildered, infuriated, a storm of emotions.

"WHAT DID YOU DO TO HER?"

Her teeth were bared. A low hiss issued, just as much from her mouth as from her throat. That sound was unmistakable. Kanaya was ready to kill.

Vriska viewed it with detachment. She had crossed a line, apparently, and gone, finally, from child, to enemy. She had finally dealt enough damage that no amount of familiarity would protect her. Rationally, there was a good likelihood that if she stayed here, her own mother would tear out her throat and feast on her flesh.

Maybe that was just the price of playing games with fate.

A jade couldn't keep up with a cobalt. Genetics were cruel like that for trolls.

Vriska ran.

Fuck home. Fuck family. The only trust that mattered was beyond the veil, and she'd only brought one person with her before.

_Sorry, Harry._


	7. The Storm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vriska and Harry can't keep off each other.  
They thrust their way into darkness, and find someone inhabiting a corner of the abyss that they may never reach.

Harry gritted his teeth. There was so much he wanted to say to his mother, and so much more that he wanted to say to his father. It was pain, it was anger, it was frustration, it was the lack of validation and confirmation of existing as his own being. It felt, in a psychological sense, like his skin was on fire. And he just had to sit there, and endure that sensation. being consumed in searing pain. like nothing was happening. Messaging friends - no, acquaintances, friends would be close enough to understand - was meaningless. They'd give advice that was relevant to the experience that he should be having, not what he was experiencing.

He wanted to talk to Vriska.

She'd get this.

She'd understand.

With these thoughts endlessly repeating, he stared at his window, a jutting peak against the perpendicular slope of the roof of their mansion, both stylish and perfectly representative of the sort of architecture that represented success in the world that no longer existed. Thinking about it made him feel vaguely dirty. It wasn't his world. Even the world he lived in wasn't his, was it-

His thoughts were interrupted by the crash of lightning and thunder. The sky had grown dark, and the fury of the heavens had made themselves known. He wondered just how much of it was attributable to his parents, to their friends, to their governance of reality itself, and how much he could take as narratively significant to his own existence.

That question did not live long.

The wooden frame, and the glass it contained, of his window exploded inwards, the curtains whipping against the walls. Scorch marks traced their way across the room, evidence of just who and what had just appeared.

Vriska stood on the window-frame, the yellow-white of her exposed carnivorous teeth glowing in the sudden darkness.

Harry was seized by two feelings at once, both simultaneous and completely unable to coexist.

_She is beautiful, and she is to be revered._

_She is horror, and she is to be feared._

It would only take a slight twist of mind to understand just what Vriska was capable of, just what she represented, but Harry was unwilling to feel that. Instead, a rictus-like smile spread across his face.

"Vris," he said. "Fuck, you're here. You're-"

His words were taken from him by a rather aggressive kiss. She carried the memetic momentum physically, slamming Harry against the far wall, their teeth rebounding off each other painfully. The pain was but a small objection. They drank in each other.

"Hey, slut," Vriska said, smiling. Harry grabbed her hips, and pressed them against him, grinding against her. Vriska leaned into it, turning his control into submission. "My little pervert," she hissed into his ear.

"How'd you get here?" The words barely made their way out of his mouth. He couldn't focus on anything other than the feel of her pressing against him, her weight, as slight as it was, falling into him. He wanted to- his words fell apart on that borderline, cognition failing him.

"Nothing is going to stop me, Harry," she said, running her tongue along the side of his own, directing his to her fangs. Despite being overwhelmed by her command of her anatomy, he still had enough room to be shocked by her control.

Her incisor drew blood on his lip, a red blossom in the flickering light.

Vriska pushed him backwards, and he stumbled, falling onto his bed.

"You're..." He looked up at her, those green, innocent eyes of his staring, taking in the vista of her small frame.

"I'm what, exactly?" She said, smiling. God, that smile was so _good_. Harry was on his back, being dominated by a high-caste troll who could probably turn him into a bloody pulp, and he just didn't fucking care. She was beautiful, not just in a physical way – Sure, she was this incredible confluence of wraith-like fragility and undeniable dominion, a being who could simply not be fought by ninety-nine percent of the world, and it was _hot_, fuck he wanted to just tear those jeans off, but she was-

He had made the mistake of sitting back up, and Vriska had corrected him with a stinging slap across the face.

"Unstoppable," he said, half a word and half a sigh.

She smirked. "You're damn right I am."

It took everything he had to pull away from their kiss.

When he did, she was standing above him. smiling wickedly.

"I'm so glad you gave in, Harry," she said. "I don't know how much longer I could have waited."

"I-" he began, hesitating. He... had he given in? He couldn't remember as much of their first time as he wanted to. Multiple conflicting accounts flew through his mind – admittedly, all of it was _hot_, and he was so hard that he was surprised his jeans (a stylistic concession to Vris) were holding fast, but none of it made sense. Once was at the hospital, once was-

Vriska dragged her nails across his chin. "Having a hard time focusing, Haaaaaaaarry?" she said in a rolling purr.

He nodded. That was definitely true, both because of existential matters, and the look of her blue-tinted tongue trailing over her lips and her eyes, both normal and eightfold, gazing over him in totality like he was a piece of meat. And god damn, she looked hungry.

Harry tossed off his shirt so fast it clung to the wall for a second. Vriska watched it as it fell past several alchemized posters of movies neither of them had ever seen, and laughed. Outside, the rain fell in thick sheets, drowning out all sense of a world past themselves.

"I didn't even have to ask," she said, treating it as a minor miracle. "It's only fair," she added, stripping off her jacket, and then her shirt, tossing them aside. The view he had was also a minor miracle. Her long black hair made for a perfect framing of her body, cascading down her shoulders, contrasting with the gray of her skin, and directing his gaze south. The swell of her chest – well, he wanted to shove his face between her breasts and never come up for air, but her abs demanded equal attention. He had been too overwhelmed with the situation to really get a good look at them in the hotel room, but she was built like a brick shithouse. There was a litheness to her, where her muscles were compressed into a small frame, but he was amazed that they fit in her.

He failed at resisting temptation, and sat up, running his fingers down her, lingering, enjoying the texture of her abs. They flexed as she touched her, and she gave into her own temptations.

Vriska grabbed him by the hair, and stopped a half an inch short of slamming his face into her. For a moment, he tried to look up and discern what she wanted him to do, but her tight grip didn't allow for more than a few degrees of deviation before he'd be ripping out his own hair. Instead, he had a face-full of breast to comprehend at a frankly scientific distance.

"Lick me," she ordered.

To him, it was less an order, and more permission. She tasted of salt and sugar, sweat and alien biology, and part of him wanted to call it blueberry, but he knew he was just being swept up by that ever-present tint on her, coming through clearer by the moment as she flushed. Vriska pushed his head down, and he kept his tongue out, tasting as much as he was allowed.

For a moment, he traced around where her belly button should be, well, if she was human. Of course, she sensed the slight hesitation, and chuckled.

"You're a curious one, aren't you?" she said, condescension in her tone, but he didn't mind, and he liked to think that she knew it. With that, she turned her side to him, tilting his chin towards her grub scars. "You want to explore? Explore."

Harry, at this point, didn't much care what part of Vriska he was getting on with, and so, he kissed every inch of her that he could reach. Her scars were particularly fascinating, in that way that the parts that one has and the other doesn't always are, but across species rather than just genders. They were the same raw shade of blue he saw on the inside of her mouth, sometimes, when she'd tease her fangs with her lips. And the texture... On a human, you'd expect something like that to be tougher than the surrounding skin, but on a troll, where everything was just a little bit harder, a little more tensioned, everything taut and firm, they were pliant. Soft. They were just scars, really, two on each side, running along the line of her ribs, but their texture matched his lips far better than he had expected.

She shivered. Far better than she had expected, too, apparently.

"Enjoying that?" Harry quipped. He hadn't heard of these being an erogenous zone, but hey, make with what you've got, right?

"I just-" Vriska caught her breath in-between words. "Hadn't thought-"

Harry wasn't quite sure what he was doing right, but he knew to keep doing it. Sooner than he expected, she pushed him back – not a lot, but enough that he couldn't put his mouth to work. She gasped.

"Damn, Vris, am I that good?" he said, allowing himself a cocky smile.

Her hand was still in his hair, but it was quivering just enough for him to feel it.

"I didn't expect that, that's all," she said, dismissing him. "It just feels weird when I touch them."

The mighty Vriska, brought low by unexpected pleasures, he thought, just before she pulled him back around, till his nose nearly rested on the top of her jeans. "I've got a better place for that mouth of yours."

He thought he got where she was going with that, and brought his hands up to unbutton them, but they froze before they could get there. Harry tried again, and he just couldn't close the gap.

Oh yeah. Mind control.

"Haaaaaaaarry... If you want me to fuck you, you have to do things riiiiiiiight."

He let his hands fall to his side, but he still didn't-

She picked up on the hesitation. "Use your teeth," she said under her breath.

Oh.

Harry struggled with the button, but he made short work of her zipper. As he began to tug on her jeans proper, Vriska slid her free hand down, and shimmied them off, revealing snug-fitting black panties, edged in lacy accents, and just sheer enough that he could see a hint of her slit.

He sat back to take in the artistic goddamn vista before him, and she let go of his hair, giving him a bit of freedom.

"Holy shit, Vris."

She put her hands on her hips, posing. "You like them?"

"Uh, yeah," Harry replied, still stunned. "You're gorgeous. Do you normally wear stuff like this?"

"I know," she said, exposing her fangs in a smile. "And no. You have any idea how hard it was to not wreck these for the last few minutes? Hell, just walking here while thinking of you. Get these the fuck off me."

Harry didn't need much encouragement for that.

He went for her panties with his teeth - "Good boy. You learn quick" - and had them low enough to be subject to gravity in moments. Above him, Vriska let out a long sigh, and he heard her bulge sliding out of her slit, rivulets of cerulean running down her thighs.

She grabbed his head with both hands, and forcefully thrust towards him. Harry would be lying if he said he hadn't thought of doing the exact same thing to her – horns being both sensitive and, effectively, handlebars, lent themselves well to fantasies of face-fucking. He hadn't imagined himself on the receiving end, but as the tip of her bulge, dripping with viscous fluid, flicked across the inside of his mouth, more deft than a tongue could ever be, he was finding that he fucking loved it.

From the deep, guttural sounds she was making, she did too. She was filling him so completely that he could barely breath, even through his nose, every breath drawing in her musk. Despite a troll's lack of pubic hair to hold and accumulate it, their was a hell of a scent to her, something deep and earthy, like freshly cut grass and oil, strangely inviting, and he wanted to stew in it. He hadn't thought of himself as a panty-sniffer, but if they smelled like this...

He choked on her, and instinctively pulled himself back. Her arms could have easily held him in place, but they gave way. She looked down at him, and he, up at her, as she withdrew from his mouth, caressing his cheek and lips instead.

Harry took a deep breath. "I can handle it, Vris," he said, not entirely sure that he could, but god damn, he wanted to try.

For a moment, she hesitated. He wasn't quite sure what for, but then, he felt it – something deep in him was tensing, and it felt like someone was caressing his cock so far down it was inside his pelvis.

"Are you-" he started, but she thrust back into him.

"Shut up, Harry," she said, before interrupting herself with an involuntary moan.

He made out with her bulge, dueling with the tip of it with his tongue, caressing the thick base with his lips, taking supreme pleasure in what he was doing to her. At the same time, he could feel her manipulating his musculature in ways he could never do consciously, and he rode an increasingly ragged edge of pleasure himself, trying not to make an absolute mess of his pants.

Harry barely managed to strip them off before Vriska started thrusting so hard as to drive his head into his bed, pinning him to its side by his shoulders. She was clawing at his scalp, and she was probably drawing blood, but he didn't care. He pinned the tip of her bulge between his tongue and the inside of his cheek, gently pinning it down with his teeth. He ran the tip of his tongue up and down those last few inches, and he could feel Vriska squirm.

"Fuck, Harry, don't stop that or I'll fucking kill you," she said, so deep and primal that he didn't doubt she meant every word of it. Just what he wanted out of her.

He could feel her mind desperately clawing at his prostate, and it was too much, way too much. He had never felt anything like it, and his mind went blank as he came his fucking brains out. At the same time, he felt Vriska swell in his mouth, and an ungodly amount of fluids came out of her bulge as she shuddered, holding onto his head less as a matter of control and more as the only thing keeping her standing.

He drank her as fast as he could, his mouth contracting to take in every ounce that she came, which was, in a few words, a fucking lot. His tongue and throat contracted, trying to keep up, and her knees buckled.

"Harry what the fuck are you doing-" she managed to get out, before screaming and collapsing onto him. She was still cumming, and he couldn't keep up. He retched, and cobalt ran down his chin, neck, and soaked into his shirt as she withdrew and collapsed onto him.

For his part, Harry couldn't form a coherent thought to save his life, and they clung to each other like they were the only anchors in a world gone mad.

Some minutes later, but not many, Harry broke the silence. "How the fuck did you do that, Vris?"

She smiled, and nuzzled deeper into his chest. "I studied a bit of human anatomy." He could feel the vibration of her voice resonating in him as much as he heard her. "I did good, didn't I?"

He couldn't help but laugh. "No shit, of course you did. I haven't felt that good, uh, ever?"

Then it was her turn to giggle. "I'll have to do that when you're inside me. If you'll live."

He shivered just thinking about it. "I don't know if I will, but you fucking better."

Vriska's arms were wrapped around him, and she used them to press harder into him. "Be careful what you say, nerd."

He cocked his head. "What?"

"Don't say you're willing to die for me."

"And what if I am?"

She sighed. "I fucking told you..." she began, but interrupted herself with a groan. "Now I have to..." she trailed off.

"If it gets us out of this bullshit," Harry said, gesturing to, well, everything, "Do it. I don't care what it is, but I need out."

"This is going to sound stupid," Vriska said, with an uncharacteristic level of humility.

"Just say it."

She took a deep breath, and pulled her head back until she could look into his eyes. Vriska cradled his chin in her hands, and he felt himself falling into those asymmetric eyes, black ringed in yellow, intoxicating in ways he doubted he'd ever understand.

"We need to find the rebellion."

He looked for any indication of irony or doubt. Harry found nothing.

"Vantas's? You think it could work?"

Vriska shrugged, but kept staring into his eyes. "I don't know, man. But we have to do something. I know in every bone, every fiber, every muscle, everything I have that this is wrong, and _fuck not doing anything about it_."

He had to agree. But... "Can we make a difference? Like, two teens against the Crocker empire? Hell, what if our parents get involved?"

"If we're involved, they have to be on our side," she said, not entirely convincingly. "Whatever you say, Harry, I'm doing it. I have to. I can't stand..." She winced, like something was stabbing at her. "I can't stand anything, Harry, I don't know what it fucking is but everything feels wrong and we need to do something and it fucking hurts and we can't not and-" Her words were rapid, breathless, and he shut her up with a kiss. When he pulled back, she was silent, drilling holes into his skull with her gaze.

"Okay," he said. "We'll go."

"You mean it?"

He nodded, and pressed his forehead to hers. "Right now, Vris. I'm with you to the end, fuck the consequences."

She smiled. "Right now?" Her eyes ran down his face, to his shirt, to his exposed thighs.

"Wow," he said. "You made a real mess of me."

"Maybe in ten minutes?" she added, smirking.

"Yeah, fuck, I need to get changed... and rinse off. The hell are you doing to me, Vris?"

"Nothing you haven't wanted," she said, and he knew it was true.

And so, their course was set.

Sometime later, they snuck out of his bedroom window, dropping to the grass outside without a care for the two-story fall. They ran into the rain, Harry following Vriska, trusting her with everything, just as she wanted, just as he needed. It was more than a minute before he looked back, and felt his blood run cold.

Above his house, his father watched them.

John was floating, encased in a vortex of wind, his god-tier pajamas whipping in his personal cyclone. The storm that had swept over their home had nothing on what John was conjuring around himself, water being wrung out of the air and flung in all directions. His arms were limp at his side, and his head was at an unusual angle, like he didn't want to bother with the effort of even keeping himself upright.

Harry couldn't read the expression on his face, but he felt... something.

He felt sorrow. Anger. Frustration. But they were just components of something deeper, something that words could not describe, and Harry could not comprehend, not yet.

Harry had never seen this side of his father, and it frightened him. It wasn't meant for him. It was meant for John, and John alone.

Harry turned back into the driving rain, and grabbed Vriska's hand, following her into the abyss.


	8. Transplant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vriska and Harry stumble backwards into precisely where she wants to be.

"So, we're just... on the run now?" Harry asked.

Vriska's hair was plastered to her face in the driving rain, a particularly long tress wrapped awkwardly around one of her horns. Why did he have to state the obvious?

"Yes, Harry."

He blinked, and she hoped, for his sake, that he was doing it because of the weather, not in reaction to her statement.

"Uh... Okay. I get that we have to do something about things being fucked up, and I get that since I'm sorta related to her, I have some pretty heavy responsibilities."

Ugh. He was getting entirely the wrong idea.

"No, dumbass. Responsibility is the wrong word."

"Holy shit, Vris, are you about to get philosophical on my ass?"

She punched him, but lightly enough that she wouldn't actually hurt him. Probably.

"You don't have a responsibility, Harry. That's stupid. It's just the right thing to do. And we're fucked."

He gripped her hand tighter. "Vriska..." His voice dropped an octave. It was a shame that those little indicators of human maturity were often linked with being a little bitch. "What do you mean when you say we're fucked?"

She bit her tongue, rather literally, and then figuratively did not.

"You know how your dad looked pissed?" She tried to downplay it with her tone, but John had legitimately terrified her. When she looked back over the open plains, as the sky had turned dark, and saw Harry's father floating a hundred feet over his house, Vriska had felt like she might actually die. This was a normal sort of thing for most people - A car flying out of control, a troll sporting event gone wrong, a CrockerCorp drone finding something vaguely objectionable about you and beginning to spew slogans, like that - but Vriska was absolutely awful at feeling fear. A lot of her decisions were governed by that fact. It was a strength, really. Fear existed to keep people away from lethal threats, and frankly, nothing could possibly be lethal to Vriska. Well...

John, cloaked in wind, without an ounce of intent or purpose, yet _bleeding _power into the atmosphere, had shook her. Vriska considered herself as someone who didn't have to goddamn try. But that... that was on a whole different level. She knew, of course, that John was a literal god. That he commanded the wind, and nebulous other powers that no one really wanted to explain in any terms that made sense. But that hadn't meant much without seeing it. Fuck. Seriously, _fuck_. She had enough to deal with already.

Harry nodded at her. "Yeah... I haven't seen him like that since... Uh, ever? It's not good."

"No shit, Harry. You want to know how that fits on a one to five scale of how fucked we are?"

He took a deep breath, which, with the wind whipping at them, was pretty remarkable that she actually could notice. Maybe it was... Internally, she scoffed, but something seemed resonant about the concept - maybe she was just attuned to him, somehow.

"Since you're saying that... one?"

She laughed. He was good at following a lead. Fuck, he'd look good on a leash.

"Closer to two. There's maybe a one in five chance that he'd kill me" - she was making this up, but fuck it, it was funny - "But he'd never fuck with you. Hell, just the fact that you're a horny little bitch for me means he'd probably go easy on me. We're fine. Except..."

Harry was just beginning to look relieved, too. They had made their way to the outskirts of the city. There was a shiver running up her spine just thinking about it. _The city._ How in the sweet merciful fuck was there a primary city? There wasn't official population estimates, but... Fuck. She didn't want to think about the implications. Canvas laid across alchemized iron bars sticking out of traditional troll abodes sheltered them, dodging between the sheets of rainwater that poured off their edges. She could smell the wet concrete, hear the plinking of the water crashing against it, and it was worth nothing, and she focused herself back on the conversation.

"Except?" he asked.

God damnit, he was fucking with her flow.

"Except I'm effectively torturing one of my mothers, and the other wants to kill me. I'm pretty sure she'd tear you in half with a chainsaw if she thought you were involved, too. Which, you are. Congrats."

Harry took this information well, all things considered.

"Wait, what the _fuck?_ Your moms are cool, what did you do?"

Vriska shrugged. "I said some things. Rose could have taken it better. And Kanaya... They love each other a lot, Harry. Turns out gifting my human mother with a psychotic breakdown kind of overrides that parental protective instinct. So I'm sitting around a five."

Harry was silent for a long time, while they darted between bits of shelter from the rain.

"You know, I'm sticking by you, Vris."

She knew that.

"No matter what you do."

I mean, of course he would, right?

Right?

"So you can tell me."

She could feel her mind _vibrate_ with the bifurcated desires to both shut the fuck up and actually talk to him about it. But what would be the point of all this if she couldn't? She was already on the path. Just fucking commit.

"I don't feel real, Harry." The words were a sigh. They felt like a death-rattle just speaking them.

Harry laughed incredulously, in that tone of _oh god don't be too serious about this, please. _He squeezed her hand. "You feel plenty real to me."

Despite herself, she smiled. He didn't get it. She didn't get it. They could just, mutually, keep on not getting it, and that'd be nice, wouldn't it?

"Back in the Sburb days... I don't know if John ever told you, but Rose fought Sburb itself."

Harry gave her that "Are you seriously mansplaining me right now?" look, and it caught her off-guard. "Vris, my mom's told me about that a half-dozen times, she thinks it's super badass."

"Well, what do you think?"

He shrugged. "I really don't know how to feel about any of it, y'know? It's mythology. Sure, it happened to people we know, but like... it's so far away."

Vriska turned this over in her head for a little while before continuing.

"Turns out, she's really uncomfortable about that time in her life. And she-" she held her breath - "she thinks I'm going down the same path."

Harry kept his eyes forward as they walked. "Uh... are you?"

"I don't really know, Harry," she lied. You tended to know when a Seer of Light was speaking the gospel truth, regardless of whether or not you knew exactly what it meant. "She freaked out about it, and I kind of mouthed off to her," she said, sheepishly.

Harry, much to her displeasure, immediately picked up on it. "That's not it."

"No, it's not."

Thankfully, he also picked up on the fact that, if he pressed the topic, she was liable to lose her shit in one way or another, and so they walked in tightly grasped silence for another mile, before Vriska stopped in front of an imposing, decrepit building and whipped out her palmhusk. She fiddled with it for a minute, then shoved it back in her pocket.

"This is the place."

She led Harry around the back of the building, into a lot full of scrap metal and miscellanious debris, before finding a stairwell, dimly lit in the orange of incandescent bulbs, that wound several stories beneath the abandoned structure.

Together, they followed it, and arrived at a rusted metal door, with a neon sign in old Alternian script. Harry blanched, and she smiled. Maybe he'd actually learned a thing or two about her ancestry.

It read, in bold letters, _"HUMANS CAN FUCK OFF"__._

And so, mostly agreeing with that sentiment, Vriska opened the door, and dragged Harry inside with her.

Vriska had an image of this place in her mind, and a solid one at that. An older cohort in the roller derby team, one who remained quite strong despite several near-complete eviscerations, had told her many stories about an underground, literally, troll-only bar where discussion of the rebellion flowed openly, where the violence of their buried culture was celebrated, in a casual sort of way, unlike the sanctioned sports that served as one of the few outlets for their more carnal impulses. The English language was a funny thing - Carnal, carnival, carnage, from sexuality to celebration to murder in a few differentiations of sound - maybe humans could _get_ them, someday.

The image, as they often were, did not easily map onto the reality.

Of course, the entire concourse was filled with trolls of many ages and castes, from her own teen gray to the seasoned adult jet-black, from rust to fuchsia, televisions on the walls displaying news, sports, general troll media, and the like. The standard you'd see in any of its ilk, really. And there were a number of stages - some obviously meant for bands, stand-up or slam poetry, while others, more like a fashion runway with a pole at the end, were meant for more erotic purposes. While this was, Vriska judged, objectively good, it was not what stood out to her. These could be seen just about anywhere, if you looked hard enough.

At the center of the room, cordoned off by a railing and a good ten-foot drop, was a sandy pit, where, at the moment, two trolls, shirtless, were beating the ever-loving shit out of each other. Blood stained the walls, and people cheered. Money exchanged hands. She judged that, as one combatant hit the ground, unconscious, that their injuries probably weren't fatal, but certainly enough to prove a point. And then, there was the general sense of the clientele....

She couldn't really put words to it, or explain _why_ she felt the way she felt. But this place felt _right_. It was the physiological sensation of a hushed, conspiratorial whisper, of dangerous camaraderie, where being overheard could mean death and therefore, every word that made it through was full of life.

This was stupid.

She walked down the stairs, grabbing Harry's arm less as a measure of comfort, and more of possession, and found her way to an empty standing table. She sat him down, walked over to the bar, ordered a few stiff drinks, and came back. If his biology couldn't handle troll intoxicants, that was his problem, she thought, sliding the glass to him.

To Harry's credit, he just went with it, and sucked down a large portion of it, wincing slightly. But he kept it down. Maybe that was to be expected, considering that she'd rammed her bulge down his throat only a few hours ago.

He exhaled sharply. "So, this is the place?"

"Yeah," she replied. "We should be fine here, for now."

"Think we could find some rebellion people-" he started.

She cut him off. "Shut up. I need some time."

So for a while, she sat. She drank. She adjusted to the noise, the chaos around her. She vacillated between feeling comfort in it, and feeling utterly foreign.

After a few minutes, Harry tried again.

"Vris, what the fuck happened?"

She raised an eyebrow at him. "There's a million ways I could answer that and all of them would be stupid. Be specific."

"At the hospital."

She rolled her eyes-

"I mean, with me."

Vriska looked at him, appraisingly. There was a lot he could ask right now. If he started questioning what, exactly, had happened, she wouldn't have a solid answer for him, and she really, really didn't like thinking about that. As that thought grew in her mind, it seemed increasingly impossible that he could ask something that wasn't awful.

"Continue," she said.

"How the hell did I have powers?" Harry asked.

A fair, if not smart, question. "Because you've always had them, you just didn't have any reason to use them before?"

"Have I? I've been trying ever since then, and I haven't been able to do a damn thing. I don't get it."

"Maybe you just suck?" she offered. A flash of uncharacteristic sympathy hit her. "Shit, try it now. Something small. I bet you can do it."

Vriska looked around, and seized upon the salt shaker on their table. She slammed it in front of Harry.

"Push it towards me. Do the windy thing. Or the voidy thing - y'know, delete the space between it and me."

She watched him shift from incredulity to resignation under her withering glare, and he focused on the salt shaker. While at first, it seemed nothing was happening, she began to notice currents of air flowing over the table. The top of her hands were cooled by the breeze, which only seemed to exist within the space of the few feet that lay between them.

Harry closed his eyes.

The salt shaker wobbled, and fell over, spilling some of its contents on the table, before spinning into Vriska's lap.

Harry opened his eyes. "What the _fuck?_"

Vriska smirked. "Told you." She grabbed the shaker, and put it back on the table.

"No, I don't think you understand, Vris," he said. "That was _exactly_ how I felt at the hospital. And that was _exactly_ how I tried feeling, how I _felt_, back at my house, day after day. And nothing happened there. There's one common element, and it isn't me."

She frowned at him. That didn't make sense. "But I'm not doing shit, Harry."

He shrugged. "I..." Harry seemed to have an objection, but he tabled it, looked down, and decided to offer another. "Then why does it only work around you?"

She _wanted_ to argue with him. Instead, she started thinking. Harry could only be in two possible states, right? Able to do a thing and not able to do a thing. Emotional condition was an unlikely qualifier - while "being around her" was certainly a strong influence on his emotional state, "being in a firefight' and "being in a semi-hostile bar" were, while both not great for him, not comparable.

Fuck.

Was it really her?

She thought about it. Tried to move the salt shaker. Nothing.

"Harry?"

"Yeah?"

"Sorry," she said, and mind-controlled him.

Still, nothing.

That... that didn't make sense. He had to be fucking up somehow.

Right?

The world felt so... thin.

Like she could just tear it apart with her fucking claws.

Was that what she was doing?

Was that what she was talking about when she spit such fucking bile at her mother?

She wanted to.

God damn, she wanted to.

She just needed to find the right place to grip, the right way to hold on, to find some little flap she could pull at, her teeth were grinding, her claws were sinking into the wooden table, all of it was just so goddamn pointless, so fragile, so unreal.

"Uh, Vriska? Maybe don't break the table?"

She reflexively flung her hands to her biceps, though their grip quickly resumed its intensity. Holes were tearing in her shirt. In her flesh. Cerulean started to flow, and she let her head fall to the table. Who fucking cared? The wounds made a sharp edge, a point of focus, maybe she could twist that, find the angle, find the way in-

"Your little boyfriend not rough enough with you, girl?" An unfamiliar voice. A drawling, lazy one. She opened her eyes to see an older-purpleblood towering over her. His tone was complicated. Mocking. Flirtatious. Condescending.

She did not appreciate this.

Vriska lifted her head back up.

"Who the fuck asked you?"

The troll smiled. "You're not denying it."

"And you're too much of a shit to find someone in your own caste, so you're hitting on me, right?"

Not the greatest insult, but she was under pressure.

He laughed. "You're here with a human. Purple to blue is a lot less than blue to red, monkeyfucker. If that can satisfy you, I'll blow your fucking mind."

That was enough to take her claws out of her arms, and she clenched her fists.

"Vriska..." Harry said. It was barely a whisper on the edge of her mind.

She smiled at the troll, her fangs sinking into lower lip. "He's more of a troll than you, you limp-bulged shit. If you were on Alternia, I don't know if you'd be culled first for being stupid, ugly, or an insult to our fucking species, but it'd be a damn good race."

At that, the purpleblood grabbed her right horn and slammed her face into the table.

Harry gasped.

"God damn, you're weak," she muttered, and in response, he smashed her into the table again.

And again.

And again.

In the distance, she could hear Harry yelling.

"Damn it, let me at him!"

She glanced up between blows, and snorted. Harry was being held back by several trolls, trolls who knew better than him. He'd have fractured his skull after the first one of these, and splattered like a rotten watermelon after the second.

"Let them fight it out, kid."

There was some indistinct yelling in a vaguely Harry-ish tone, though it was hard to hear exactly what he was saying when her face and ears were becoming gradually covered in her own blood, and her head was ringing.

_Okay_, she thought.

Slam.

"You had enough, you human-fucking slut?"

She started laughing, and she couldn't stop.

_You know what? Yeah._

Her arm shot up, and grabbed the one that was holding on to her horn, and twisted her grip and her head in opposite directions until she heard a crack. The purpleblood groaned, and let go of her head. As he did, Vriska swept her leg out, catching him in the back of the knee. He went down. Evidently, he was not prepared for someone who fought back. As he fell, she pounced on him, grabbing his unbroken arm, and came down on the joint with her elbow, giving him a matching set. Her claws tore a few gashes in his shirt, and the flesh beneath it, but something about the motion disgusted her. She pulled back. Stood up. He was dazed.

_Good opportunity,_ she thought.

So, she kicked him in the head.

Over and over again.

Her shoes were not suited for it, and her toes felt like they were about to crack, but every blow, every strike that threatened to snap his neck in half and knock his head off his shoulders, was sublime. She shifted to heel blows, and caved in his nose. Another well-aimed stomp turned one of his eyes into a bloody mess. She kind of liked the look of purple shoes. And this was easier than buying a pair.

She was still laughing, while the purple-blood was retching, choking on his own blood.

On the edge of her consciousness, she heard a voice.

"Vris!"

_Fuck it_, she thought, and dropped another heel to his throat.

"Vris, stop, for fuck's sake, before you kill him!"

Ah. She knew that voice.

The world came back into focus, and Harry was there, grabbing her by the shoulders.

"Shit, Vris, he deserves it, but maybe don't do a murder when we're already in deep shit?"

She shrugged. Below her, her assailant made a gurgling noise. "He'll live," she said, licking her lips. She took unexpected pleasure in the taste of her own blood.

Harry looked to the crowd that had gathered around them, and the few trolls who were carting the guy off, and they nodded at him. He shrugged, and gently directed her back to the table. He looked at it, covered in her blood, and took his napkin, wiping as much as he could off, before sitting her down.

He sat back in his seat, and she smiled.

Around them, the atmosphere was mostly returning to its native state, though she could feel some fear aimed in her direction. As it should be.

"You uh... you feeling better, Vris?"

"Much."

She kind of expected some kind of talking-to by security, if they had such a thing, or some kind of staff member. It never came. Instead, when someone came up to the table to break into their conversation, it was a shifty-looking teal, who only led with a "Hey" and an inquisitive nod.

Harry responded with a "Sup", and the troll's attention shifted from Vriska to Harry.

"You in a quadrant with her?" he asked. It was an extremely forward question, but something in his tone told her that he wasn't trying to change whatever the answer was.

"I think so?" Harry said, as she said "Several". This answer seemed to surprise the teal, and Harry even more so.

The tealblood recovered, and cocked his head at Harry. "Good - Then what I'm about to say applies to you, too," he said, extending his hand. "Kieran." It took Harry a moment to process what had just happened enough to shake it, and reply. "Harry. Nice to uh, meet you?" The troll turned to Vriska, and repeated the motion.

She shook his hand hesitantly. "Vriska. The fuck do you want?"

Kieran laughed, shoving his hands back into his pockets and winking. "Isn't it obvious?"

"No."

Somehow, this only made him laugh more. "Okay, 1. You're here with a human, therefore: A. You don't care about fitting in and B. Together you're willing to get a bit dangerous. 2. You just beat the shit out of a purpleblood after taking a beating yourself, so A. you're a tough one, and 2.1, you did nothing to de-escalate the conflict, so therefore B. you're pretty violent."

She looked at him, taking in his asterisk-shaped horns, his dirty trench-coat, and his necklace, shaped like a small, sideways 69. Hm.

"Yeah,' she replied. "So?"

"Well," he said, smiling wider. "First, there's the matter of 3. Being a cross-species couple, you've likely had some trouble with the Crocker Administration and their crackdowns, to which I postulate you are A. angry about, and B. want to do something about. Correct?"

Harry and Vriska both nodded.

Kieran clapped. "Therefore, I think we can open up a new tab - I. The reason why you're here, under which I propose the subheading A. To find me."

She blinked, but Harry was the first to respond.

"The fuck are you talking about?"

Kieran sighed. "The _rebellion_," he whispered, but just about as loudly as one could whisper.

"Oh," Harry said. "Fuck yeah, I'm down with that. Though, uh..."

Vriska shot him a look, and remembered that her... whatever he was was kind of an idiot sometimes. "You do remember that we are completely and totally fucked, right?"

He nodded. "Yeah... I guess it's your call, Vris. Is he right?"

"Yeah. I want to fuck shit up."

Kieran looked pleased with this answer. "Good!"

Just as he was about to turn away, he whipped back around. "Question: When you say "completely and totally fucked", do you mean that A. as an exaggeration for effect, or B. an accurate description of your current situation?"

"B," Vriska replied. "If I wasn't here, I might be getting chainsaw-murdered."

Her tone, evidently, wasn't serious enough, because Kieran kept looking at her expectantly for a clarification. When time continued to pass without her elaborating, his expression turned. The look of pity on his face made her want to claw it off, but she did her best to stomach it.

"Well," he said, "We can find you two accommodations. Stick around for a few hours. After the bar closes, no one will kick you out. Then we'll direct A. you and B. any other present members in need of shelter to a safe location. Is that fine?"

She nodded.

"Good," Kieran replied, and he faded into the crowd.

Harry gave her a long, long look. "Did we... did we just join the fucking rebellion?"

"Yeah, dumbass."

"Like, _Karkat Vantas's rebellion_?"

She sighed. "He had Vantas's symbol on his necklace."

Harry sat back in his chair. "Fuck. Wow. Just like that, really?"

"Yeah," she said, grinning. "Just how it goes, Harry."

Harry bent over onto the table, holding his head in his hands. "What in the sweet fuck is happening to my life?" he said, laughing.

Vriska licked her lips. Covered in rivulets of blood, warping the course of lives, with Harry there to feel it all. Just how she wanted it.

"Me, Haaaaaaaary. That's what."


End file.
